"Crime by Blossoms."

A tongue-in-cheek review of the annual Chelsea Flower Show, constituting Bates's first of several works showing his love of gardening and, in particular, flowers.

Also of note are two references to "masculine-looking ladies [who] buttonholed them [nurserymen] and bombarded them with the fiercest horticultural catechisms." Bates's fiction features a number of lesbian characters who are consistently portrayed as masculine in appearance and manner.

Bates would again revisit the subject in 1935 ("Chelsea"), 1936 ("The Other Chelsea") and in a 1937 Country Life column for The Spectator ('The Exclusiveness of Chelsea'. February 26, 1937, p. 357).

In the New Statesman and Nation (May 27, 1933, v:118, pp. 684-685, attached).