i;2 THE ROLL OF THE SEASONS 



It is said that the bell of the snowdrop encloses 

 air two degrees warmer than that outside. If a little 

 sun shines, our kitchen garden, even in January, some- 

 times feels like the Garden of Eden. To-day, with 

 the bees at eager commerce among the lavender 

 blooms, with the gorgeous butterflies sailing among 

 the artichoke blooms, with plums, peaches, and apples 

 glowing in the last ecstasy of colour, the air, albeit, just 

 laced with the tonic of September, the walled garden 

 seems the whole world and the hour of noon the whole 

 twenty-four hours. It is indeed the Garden of Eden 

 regained by generations of human industry. We are 

 back again not only in the place but in the days when 

 we bottled the bees at work in the foxgloves, or 

 watched those wonderfully courageous little spiders 

 attack even the wasps that got entangled in their net. 

 And as it seems, the same fly-catcher inhabiting the 

 same branch of the jargonelle permits us to take 

 pleasure in her work. 



The kitchen garden is far older than the flower 

 garden, even than the happy, perennial flower garden 

 that our great-grandfathers loved. The first flowers 

 were planted here as thank-offerings for the more sub- 

 stantial benefits received, and 'many of them remain 

 here to this day. At the same time, our kitchen 

 garden is far older than most of the vegetables it now 

 officially contains. Every schoolboy knows what is 

 the age of the British potato. At the time when its 

 first tubers were propagating in England, carrots and 

 onions and "sallets of herbs" were being imported 

 from the Continent for royal and other wealthy tables. 

 It is true that Piers Ploughman, or, at any rate, his 

 master, could eat parsley and leeks and cabbage about 



