This is the first day of one of the great gardening interests and treats in the year-the Royal Horticultural Show in the Temple Gardens. I go every year now, and should be sorry to miss it. How odd it seems, that for years and years I never went to a flower show, or knew anything about them, and now they have become one of the interests of my life! The great attraction this year is the revival of what are called old-fashioned late single Tulips-Breeders, Flames, etc Those who like to buy the bulbs, ordering them carefully by the catalogue, may have their gardens gay with Tulips for over two months, certainly the whole of April and May. The quantity of Apples, for so late in the season, was what struck me as almost the most remarkable thing at the show. One of the great growers told me that he had tried every conceivable plan for keeping Apples, but that nothing answered so well as laying them simply on open, well-aired shelves in a fruit-house that was kept free from frost.

Tradescantia virginica (Spiderworts) are plants that do admirably in light soils, and flower two or three times in the summer, wanting nothing beyond thinning-out and transplanting, and dividing in the autumn. The pale-blue and the white are even more beautiful than the dark-blue and the red-purple; but they are all worth having, with their quaint-shaped flowers, so unlike other things. Every year, towards the end of May, I put in cuttings of Lavender and Rosemary. If the weather is dry, they are what gardeners call 'puddled-in,' which means that the ground is very much wetted first. In this way I have a constant supply of young plants. Rosemary is only really hardy with us if planted under the protection of large shrubs; the keen winds of March cut them off in the open. Many other plants can be increased in the same way-early flowering shrubs such as Ribes san-guinum, the Forsythias, etc. Last spring, in Suffolk, I saw a charming little garden-hedge made of Ribes san-guinum, all one brilliant mass of its flowers. This is quite worth trying; its success would depend on its being sharply pruned back the moment after flowering and before its seeds ripen. If your cuttings take, you can make your hedge in October. It is rather a repetition of the well-known and often-seen Sweetbriar hedge, which is all the better in a light soil for cutting back the young growths in July as well as for the spring pruning. It is a very good plan this month to take off some of the shoots-apt to be too numerous-that sprout on the pruned-back creepers, such as White Jasmine, Vines of all kinds, and Bignonia radicans, which handsome old garden favourite buds so late that the flowers do not expand unless treated in this way.