I adore Robin Lane Fox’s “On gardens” column but I have to remind him that TS Eliot’s observation about lilacs — that in April they breed “out of the dead land” (the opening lines of “The Waste Land”) — was probably based on his early years in St Louis, somewhat removed from your columnist’s “chilly Cotswolds” in terms of its botanical calendar (“Mayday May Day?”, House & Home, May 3).
Lane Fox might also have recalled “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, Walt Whitman’s elegy to Abraham Lincoln, written immediately following the president’s assassination on April 14 1865 and the ensuing funeral train that set out a week later to take his body from Washington to Springfield, Illinois, where he is buried.
William Bernhardt
New York, NY, US
