A few days’ visit to Dean Hole’s own home at Caunton Manor, near Newark, will ever remain among the writer’s pleasantest memories. It must have been five and twenty years ago, and it was June, the time of Roses. To one whose home was on a poor sandy soil it was almost a new sight to see the best of Roses, splendidly grown and revelling in a good loam. Not that the credit was mainly due to the nature of the garden ground, for, as the Dean (then Canon Hole) points out in his delightful “Book about Roses,” the soil had to be made to suit his favourite flower. In this, or some one of his books, he feelingly describes how many of the visitors to his garden, seeing the splendid vigour of his Roses, at once ascribed it to the excellence of his soil. “Of course,” they said, “your flowers are magnificent, but then, you see, you have got such a soil for Roses.” “I should think I had got a soil for Roses,” was the reply, “didn’t I mix it all myself and take it there in a barrow?” I quote from memory, but this is the sense of this excellent lesson. The writer’s own experience is exactly the same. Of the quantities of garden visitors who have come--their number has had to be stringently limited of late--not one in twenty will believe that one loves a garden well enough to take a great deal of trouble about it. In fact, it is only this unceasing labour and care and watchfulness; the due preparation according to knowledge and local experience; the looking out for signal of distress or for the time for extra nourishment, water, shelter or support, that produces the garden that satisfies any one with somewhat of the better garden knowledge; a knowledge that does not make for showy parterres or for any necessarily costly complications; rather, indeed, for all that is simplest, but that produces something that is apparent at once to the eye, and sympathetic to the mind, of the true garden-lover.