From the Editor

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

There is a greenhouse behind the garage, or should I say there was a greenhouse when we left the house, but that was a long time ago. It was tucked away, not visible from the street, so passing by would offer little to confirm the veracity of this memory. Many of the other features of that house are long since gone: the leaded glass windows with their small diamond-shaped and colored panes, the heavy wooden gates and the path to the front door of cobbled stones and flint. It is hard to remember these things after the tools of renovation have done their work.

The tucked-away greenhouse was a structure primarily made out of 12-inch panes of glass held together by some metal structure, the construction of which my young mind did not consider. It rested on a frame of bricks, the traditional red brick that was omnipresent in this part of the country but, due to weathering, was for as long as I can remember always in need of repointing and cleaning. The brick was in many places white, calcified by the build-up of minerals that probably leached from the soil beds that were resting up against its interior surface. Much of the mortar between the bricks had been eroded and replaced by moss — more evidence of the excesses of water.

England has always been known as the land of small plot gardeners, probably a vestige of a besieged wartime mentality when any plot of land was enlisted in the production of anything edible. But perhaps this idea is limited by my knowledge of history (or what I recall from history class); it is just as likely that this need to utilize anything in the service of food production dates back to the time of the Magna Carta and the need to establish the ownership of land.

The garden would be considered large by most measures — a large expanse of grass supported by the unrelenting rains of English winters and