was around the time that Dylan Thomas was resident, and writing about the web-footed cocklewomen of Laugharne. Les Parson experimented with bottling cockles in vinegar, to enable them to be sold further afield, and established Parson's Pickles. The firm uses Laugharne Castle as part of its corporate identity because the original factory was located in a mill close to the castle. The company now operates out of Burry Port and produces cockles, mussels, shellfish and pickles, to traditional recipes and European Union accreditation standards. Vegetables and fruit Vegetables and fruit are grown in gardens and alltoments and Lynette Roberts describes the Carmarthenshire cottage garden as follows: "In most gardens here two-thirds are taken up with potato seed, with a row shovelled up for broad beans, cabbage and parsley, and a small finer bed about 3ft by 4ft containing lettuce, carrot, leeks, shallots, beetroot and perhaps a little cress and radish. This makes a cottager independent as he seldom requires any other choice of vegetable." In Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas writes about Mary Ann the Sailors and her cottage garden as follows, comparing it with the Garden of Eden: "The Garden of Eden. She comes in her smock-frock and clogs Away from the cool scrubbed cobbled kitchen with the Sunday-school pictures on the whitewashed wall and the farmers' almanac hung above the settle and the sides of bacon on the ceiling hooks, and goes down the cockleshelled paths of that applepie kitchen garden, ducking under the gippo's clothespegs, catching her apron on the blackcurrant bushes, past beanrows and onion-bed and tomatoes ripening on the wall towards the old man playing the harmonium in the orchard, and sits down on the grass at his side and shells the green peas that grow up through the lap of her frock that brushes the dew." In describing the walled garden at Heolddu, Margaret Evans recalled that the cottage garden was once considered to be a 'chemist shop" with vegetables, greens and fruit grown to keep the family healthy. Vegetables that could be stored and eaten during the winter included leeks, parsley, cabbage, swedes, carrots, parsnips, potatoes, and nuts. Walled kitchen gardens were usually constructed for larger Carmarthenshire houses and here fruit, flowers and vegetables would be grown. The walls gave privacy and protected the plants from the frost and often included greenhouses for tender plants. In Carmarthenshire most of these gardens date from