For David Winter Cottages, 1995 is the year of the garden. The British Isles are tripple blessed by our national devotion to cultivating the patch of ground around our houses and making them blossom into fragrant and colourfu delights. Nowhere else in the world will you find so many people giving up so much of their leisure time to sowing, pruning, weeding, feeding and watering the garden. It is almost an Anglo addiction.
   A drive through suburbia to the countryside is the reward for everyone who enjoys flowers and lawn, shrubs and trees, ponds and rockeries, a uniquely British passion for spring and summer floral decoration. But why do we do this, why do we set aside so much time and effort growing blooms of so many shapes and colours and lawns of manicured perfection? Surely the answer lies amongst that confusing jumble of fragments that is the British mentality. We are individuals who hate to be thought of as part of any collective grouping, so even if we have to live in a house which is architecturally similar to it's neighbours, then we will make the area around it as different as can be. This says "Here lives a somebody who has put their whole personality into this garden and they hope it shows!" A garden is an open canvas for free display with unlimited scope for self expression through thousands of different planting schemes in borders of varying shapes and all for the price of a few packets of seeds and plenty of fertilizer. What more could any creative mortal wish in order to demonstrate he has not been robotised and pummelled into faceless conformity? So inside every Briton you have a gardener escaping from the mundane into their own realm of fantasy and freedom in amongst the vibrant flowers of their personal identity, in other words, we're all gardeners at heart and would happily live in Gardenerr's Cottage pottering away with our green fingers to make our homes a place of beauty.