MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROL D N 'COLSON
DRIVING back the other evening through the northern suburbs I was startled by the beauty of the flowering trees in the gardens of Golders Green and Hampstead. As seen from the top of an omnibus (that swaying parapet of delight) they seemed to pour cascades of scent and colour on the streets. It is not merely that this intemperate spring has been specially favourable to spring blossom ; it is also that the trees and shrubs planted in the suburban gardens have this year for the first time attained to full maturity. Most of the new varieties (the double plums and cherries, the pyrus tribe, the coloured quinces, the heavy French lilacs, the admirable improvements on the too emphatic laburnum) have only become available to the ordinary gardener since 192o. Until this year they were too young to display their full beauty, but this May they swayed and clustered with adult richness. We have always been the best gardeners in the world, and even in savage days the Anglo-Saxon used and named five hundred different varieties of plants when Apuleius could only think of one hundred and eighty-three.
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