the soil in a cool greenhouse, in April, to the amount of five bushels to the twenty-one feet square. And when chance brought me, in 1896, in company with a local gardener, to a tiny, retired “vinery” of a veteran grower, I could see there, and admire, what a lover of gardening can obtain from so small a space as the two-thirds of an acre, Two small “houses” about forty feet long and twelve feet wide, and a third-formerly a pigsty, twenty feet by twelve-contained vine trees which many a professional gardener would be happy to have a look at; especially the whilom pigsty, fitted with “Muscats”! Some grapes (in June) were already in full beauty, and one fully understands that the owner could get in 1895, from a local dealer, £4 for three bunches of grapes (one ofthem was a “Colmar,” 13 3/4 lb. weight). The tomatoes and strawberries in the open air, as well as the fruit trees, all on tiny spaces, were equal to grapes; and when one is shown on what a space half a ton of strawberries can be gathered under proper culture, it is hardly believable.
It is especially in Guernsey that the simplification of the greenhouse must be studied. Every house in the suburbs of St. Peter has some sort of greenhouse, big or small. All over the island, especially in the north, wherever you look, you see greenhouses. They rise amid the fields and from behind the trees; they are piled upon one another on the steep crags facing the harbour of St. Peters and with them a whole generation of practical gardeners has grown up. Every farmer is more or less of a gardener, and he gives free scope to his inventive powers for devising some cheap type of greenhouses. Some of them have almost no front and back walls — the glass roofs coming low down and the two or three feet of glass in front simply reaching the ground; in some houses the, lower sheet of glass was simply plunged into a wooden trough standing on the ground and filled with sand. Many houses have only two