people-from-wales

"The book opens like a , with the author trekking after native guides along a snake-infested trail through a in the wilds of . Then — after a plant-gathering side trip with an apothecary in 1629 into the wilds of Kent — we find her riding "with horsemen through the of ". Clearly, it is a member of the band of intrepid English woman explorers who will be leading us through the taxonomical wilderness."

"Though there are exceptions in all species, many useful border plants — s, s, members of the , s — have foliage that is at best undistinguished, at worst down right ragged. Careful placing of foliage plants will disguise these shortcomings very well. They bring an outstanding variety of form to mixed plantings: fat rounded leaves of , feathery plumes of , stiff sword shapes of and ."

"For an extrovert April scheme of brilliant yellow and red, intolerable to a melancholy poet such as Eliot, combine a good clear-coloured such as x superba "Crimson and Gold" with groups of s and single early s."

"As far as western Europe is concerned, the 's story began in Turkey, from where in the sixteenth century, European travellers brought back news of the brilliant and until then unknown lils rouges, so prized by the Turks. In fact there were not lilies at all but tulips. In April 1559, the Zürich physician and botanist saw the tulip flowering for the first time in the splendid garden made by Johannes Heinrich Herwart of , . He described its gleaming red petals and its sensuous scent in a book published two years later, the first known report of the flower growing in western Europe. The tulip, wrote Gesner, had 'sprung from a seed which had come from or as others say from '. From that flower and from its wild cousins, gathered over the next 300 years from the steppes of Siberia, from Afghanistan, Chitral, and the , from Isfahan, the Crimea and the , came the s which have been grown in gardens ever since. More than 5,500 different tulips are listed in the International Register published regularly since 1929 by the in the Netherlands."

"All of my gardening coats have been my husband's cast-offs. He is sufficiently bigger than me for the coats to be roomy and snug. They all have the same faint smell of wet dog which I find strangely comforting and they are all well endowed with pockets. Why do tailors think that men need more pockets than women? Surely it should be the other way round."

"The object of the Socialist movement is not material but spiritual; it lies in the discovery of methods of reducing to a minimum the attention of man to the material things of life in order that he may have more time to develop personality and make what use he will of a splendid leisure."

"Germany has said that British democracy is degenerate. Well, I for one was never more proud of British democracy than when Professor Freud, that great scientist, aged and infirm, became an exile from his country and was welcomed within our shores. There was taken to him as an invalid the register of the Royal Society in order that he might inscribe his name therein, an act which I believe has never been carried through in this country except for members of our Royal Family; and thus degenerate democracy linked an exiled and distinguished Jewish scientist with members of our own Royal Family. That seemed to me a cause of pride, and not a sign of degeneracy."

"Growing foreign perils were perceived and promptly and fully reported, first to London and then to ministers. Some permanent officials, such as Crowe in his time and later Vansittart, struggled hard to convince governments of the need for a strong foreign policy, and to puncture the prevailing euphoria with a bodkin of realism. They failed. They failed because there was another, competing influence on politicians, a more congenial and therefore in the end a more effective influence: a constellation of moralising internationalist cliques, each with its ideas-peddlers, its contact-men in high places, and its tame press. These busy romantics – from Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) and Lord Robert Cecil on the Right, through liberals like Smuts and Gilbert Murray in the middle to Kingsley Martin and Clifford Allen on the Left – not only believed, admirably enough, that morality rather than power ought to govern relations between states but acted as though it did... The internationalists successfully imposed on governments their pretension to speak for the inarticulate and unsounded body of the British nation; that is, to represent public opinion at large."

"He believed that Christianity stood for the bettering of their fellow men, and the raising of their condition. Were not these the very tenets of Socialism?"