Gladioli – like the sunflower they are enormous. Our friend and preface writer Charles Lock wrote yesterday to say: ‘The inventor of the allotment seems to have been Moritz Schreber in c. 1850 (incidentally, it was his son Daniel who was Freud’s patient ). In German the word is Schrebergarten, intended for those living in apartments ie. most of the urban population of Europe apart from the English. Railway lines created many waste spaces around the allotment/Schrebergarten and this was an  obvious use.’ Here in Bath the allotments are on the western edge of the city between a park and ‘the Buildings’ and, amazingly, have never been built on.