An amateur's gardening year often begins with March, but the Garden Year began, like the year itself, in January. You cannot make a garden quickly from a March beginning, because work grows so fast that much of it can only be half done. Business folk say they must wait for the spring evenings, because they cannot get into their gardens by day. But what of the glorious winter moons, which shine in a frost-clear sky? When the air is brisk, and the ground hard, manure may be wheeled to spots convenient for spreading. And when the ground softens it may be trenched. Now, it is the early manuring and the trenching which make the garden. Note that, please. Write it out and underline it. On nights of crisp radiance, when the stars shone, and the limb of the moon crept up over the edge of the hill to hold a lamp for us, we used fork and spade. We dug deeply, we dug with a hearty gusto. While poor, unhappy people huddled in gas-lit rooms playing bridge, we trenched our ground two spades deep, taking weed roots out, and putting manure in. Wilkins worked by day, and Eunice and the author worked by night. (Eunice and the author had talked of other things than digging when they first went out together under the moon, but those times were no happier than these.)

The Rose Garden. - The man who made the garden had put a Hawthorn hedge round a little square of grass, about a sixth of an acre in area. As he had planted fruit trees within, his idea may have been to make an orchard, but as he had forgotten to take any notice of the trees afterwards they were starved and decrepit. The pseudo-orchard was marked down as the site of a real Rose garden, and the author would like to tell just how he made a Rosery of it, because it was one of our greatest successes. Of course you know the model Rose garden - the Dean Hole Rose garden - with its oval beds each planted with one variety only, its arches, and its paths all converging on one central object, such as a fountain, pool, or group. It is a beautiful conception, but it was not quite suitable for us, because paths, of a sort, existed. So we made rectangular beds, and relieved the formality with pillars and arches. The average width of our beds was 6 feet, for that takes three rows of plants, and they are not crowded if planted in angles, thus: -

Every fourth plant on the two outer rows was a pillar or arch variety.

Fig. Every fourth plant on the two outer rows was a pillar or arch variety.

We prepared the ground by taking off the turf (using it for an extension of the lawn), trenching, and manuring.

One of the dining-room windows looked across the pseudo-orchard, so we arranged two long rectangles with a broad strip of turf for a path, pillars beside and arches over it, to form a vista. The best pillars were Félicité Perpétue, Rampant, Ards Rover, Euphrosyne (the Pink Rambler), and the Penzance Briers Lucy Ashton, Meg Merrilies, Lucy Bertram, and Rose

Bradwardine. The best arches were Crimson Rambler, Carmine Pillar, and Dundee Rambler. (Wilkins warmly approved this idea, and told Eunice that he always had liked perjurers. She looked mystified, but made no reply. Later on, however, she asked me whether the "g" in pergola was soft.) But disconnected arches, oh, Wilkins, do not form a "perjurer! "

The Herbaceous Borders. - We began our herbaceous borders, too, in January. We first spread on manure, and afterwards, when it had rotted and softened the ground, we dug it in. But this was temporising. It was a mistake that we recognised later. There were plants in the border, but they were old and worn, with weed roots amongst them. The next year, when we had learned wisdom, we cleared the border of its plants, trenched, manured, ejected weeds, and replanted only the outer parts of the old clumps. The central ones are old and worn out.

We toyed with our herbaceous borders at the beginning, for our ideas were limited. Later on, when we had gained confidence, they became bolder. We marked out broad stretches of ground, which we cleared and trenched. We set pillars, tree forks, and logs, in them, to break their uniformity. We skirted them with broad grass paths to provide a rich foil of turf for the banks of bloom.

We thus learned that you can make a garden beautiful in a few weeks, and of a beauty that will both satisfy and last. For your soil - depth, for your ideas - breadth; those are the two secrets.

The Fruit Garden. - Eunice was a little trying with regard to fruit. She turned over catalogues by the dozen, and put them down with great sighs. "Of course we can't have Apples, and Pears, and Plums, and Cherries this year," she said dolefully. "We must put up with a few Strawberries."

"Can't? Why not?" growled the author. (It was only months afterwards that he found out that this was Eunice's way of getting them. "If I'd asked for them I should have had my head snapped off. I know what men are," and so forth.)

"Strawberries," he pursued, as Eunice only looked obstinate, "may satisfy you, but they certainly won't me."

There were no walls, so we drove in long, stout posts at the side of the kitchen garden paths, and strained wire on them - five lengths 1 foot apart. To these we tied cordon (single stem) trees, planted 2 feet apart. When the work was finished, and the author was able to point out to Eunice eighteen varieties of Apples, twelve of Pears, and six each of Plums and Cherries ("All distinct varieties mind, ripening one after the other, so that we shall have a regular supply of first-class fruit for months together, and taking up no room to speak of"), she said she never would have believed it could be done, and what silly, ignorant things women were.

Wilkins accepted this compliment for himself, and suggested a lower framework, with one length of wire a yard above the ground, for Raspberries. Which done, he allowed himself to be wheedled out of a sl ce of the kitchen garden for Currants, Gooseberries, and a bed of Strawberries.

Artful little Eunice! How neatly she managed Wilkins!