He showed too the respect for property, the cautious warmth which released into total loyalty, that feel for the old, in people and things, that gives the meanest garden-hoe a nobility, the poorest person a human chivalry.

Nowhere in the world is order more quietly and forcefully conducted.Even the savagery of the undergrowth, as Nature regulates herself in squeals and rustlings not seen by our unsuspecting eyes, is viewed as the order of life, another tiny part of the Universe taking care of itself as only Nature can, and should.

Beyond any of these considerations, for page after page, the sense of warm growth, the smells of grass, freshly cut and pushing back up through a yielding earth,the feel of vast azure skies, still and hot in the long afternoons, with shadows cast and pronounced on the baked ground, give an experience of pastoral tranquillity that must have been a source of constant inspiration to the writer.

The book is a personal odyssey; the clearing of a garden a mighty obstacle finally overcome by a triumph of will,the negotiations with the plumber an exercise in Foreign Diplomacy, and the establishment of the house, home, the land, a tremenduous victory in the life of one small and orderly , courageous, man.

Throughout the book is the feel for the land and sky, the shimmering heat that floats through the days of Provence, the length of daylight and the divisions of day as the rituals of orderly French life are observed;pithily reflected in the title.

It is truly an evocative book, one that can be read again and again, with gathering insight to the ways of France, the appeal of it all to the author, and as an exercise in sheer self-indulgence when the grey rain and relentless mists turn our part of the hemisphere into a mean and pitiless climate.