It can't be said too often - if you have a garden, use it. It may be small, but by being clever with pots you can do a lot; not only herbs but tomatoes in the right situation, and along walls you can spread apples and pears, oh and loganberries and other fruits you'll think of. And in the course of time, your children having picked up a few ideas (no forced labour when they're young or you'll get no results) will, naturally - if they have any space themselves, in their turn, bend their minds to the delights of fruit you can pick fresh yourself and not have to wonder what atrocious chemicals it has been subject to. One known family has been able to spread round its members and its friends this year practically the full canon of eatables from apples, plums, pears, through the soft fruit and salad vegetables, not to mention herbs of extensive variety, and here and there on to exotics. Quince, for example. It shouldn't be so unusual, but not many are come across yielding enough fruit to give you jams and jellies and the unbeatable liqueur which is worth all the trouble it takes, mild-seeming yet spicy. Besides, gardening is healthy exercise. But back to the fruits. A fig tree, transplanted from its original site on moving house, gave a lovely little basketful of a fruit which does not always travel well. Grapes, from a vine that first came into the family over sixty years ago and has been transplanted more than once and occasionally taken as cuttings, will give something more than a hundred bunches each year. Is the damson going out of fashion? It seems not to be as prevalent as it was. Perhaps too big for a suburban garden of modest size. And greengages.
Sometimes the owner becomes so fond of a tree that he or she wants to go on admiring it until it is stripped entirely by the birds. As with that luminous wonder, the golden hornet crabapple. "It lights up that corner of the garden" says the woman of the house. "Besides the birds love the apples." Then we come to the most striking of them all, the arbutus or strawberry tree. One owner has only recently learned, from Jane Grigson's Fruit Book, that, when really ripe, dark red, the fruit is most edible and especially mixed in a fruit salad. It makes a lovely tart in an individual pastry case. Charles Nelson in the September Irish Garden recommends arbutus x andrachnoides which has a lovely red bark.