Walter Raleigh isn’t mentioned in Harding and Taigel’s essay ‘An Air of Detachment: Town Gardens in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’ possibly because he was beheaded in the early 17th century. But lacking inclusion hasn’t diminished his reputation as a smoker and, more to the point, an early adopter of Peruvian cuisine. As a dedicated consumer of both Nicotiana tabacum and Solanum tuberosum I was anxious to interview one of the first Englishmen to share my addictions. Walter refused to conduct an email interview so we met last Saturday night at the Harcourt Arms in Oxford while he was in town to wrap up some business at Oriel College.