at 10 Downing Street, Lady Eden oversaw the organisation of official receptions. She brought in new caterers, causing US secretary of state John Foster Dulles to lose a bet with a fellow dinner guest that he knew "exactly what every course is going to be". Because the Edens' tenure was so short, Lady Eden's plans to return the fabric and furniture of the house to the styles of the 1730s, when it was built, were never realised. Lady Eden was not very fond of Chequers, though she did take a keen interest in the garden and grounds, introducing old fashioned roses and increasing the range of fruit trees. However, her successor, Lady Dorothy Macmillan, so keen a horticulturalist that she sometimes gardened at night, removed yellow and white flowers planted by Lady Eden and replaced them with roses of a "normal [colour]". One episode at Chequers attracted considerable publicity. In January 1956 Lady Eden politely requested the occupant of a farm worker's cottage on the estate to hang her washing where it could not be seen by visitors. Although it seems that the washing may have been hung across a lime walk, beyond the boundary of the cottage garden itself, the story was taken up by the Daily Mirror as an alleged example of Lady Eden's high-handedness. Coming shortly after attacks in the press on Eden's leadership, the timing was unfortunate. In April 1956 Lady Eden hosted a dinner at Chequers for the visiting Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin. Khrushchev noted that Lady Eden's (sober) behaviour contradicted a briefing from the Soviet embassy in London that she shared some of Churchill's "traits in the matter of drinking". Over dinner (when, according to his hostess, he ate nothing despite his reputation for eating and drinking greedily), he responded rather bluntly to her question about the range of Soviet missiles that "they could easily reach your island and quite a bit farther". The following morning Khrushchev mistook Lady Eden's room for Bulganin's but, having provoked a cry after almost walking in on her, beat a hasty retreat and did not identify himself. He confided later in Bulganin with whom he "had a good laugh over [the] incident". Suez Crisis As the Suez Crisis reached its climax in 1956, the Labour Party opposed Anglo-French attacks on Egypt. On 1 November Lady Eden found herself sitting next to Dora Gaitskell, wife of