180 SYLVA BOOK i 



over-top them) a very profitable grove may be rais'd, 

 and yield magazin of singular advantage, to furnish 

 the industrious planter. 



5. But Columella has another expedient for the 

 raising of our spinetum^ by rubbing the now mature 

 hips and haws, ashen-keys, Gfc. into the crevices of 

 bass-ropes, or wisps of straw, and then burying them 

 in a trench : Whether way you attempt it, they 

 must (so soon as they peep, and as long as they require 

 it) be sedulously cleans'd of the weeds ; which, if in 

 beds for transplantation, had need be at the least three 

 or four years ; by which time even your seedlings 

 will be of stature fit to remove ; for I do by no means 

 approve of the vulgar premature planting of sets, as 

 is generally us'd throughout England ; which is to 

 take such only as are the very smallest, and so to 

 crowd them into three or four files, which are both 

 egregious mistakes. 



6. Whereas it is found by constant experience, 

 that plants as big as ones thumb, set in the posture, 

 and at the distance which we spake of in the horn- 

 beam ; that is, almost perpendicular (not altogether, 

 because the rain should not get in 'twixt the rind and 

 wood) and single, or at most, not exceeding a double 

 row, do prosper infinitely, and much out-strip the 

 densest and closest ranges of our trifling sets, which 

 make but weak shoots, and whose roots do but hinder 

 each other, and for being couch 'd in that posture, on 

 the sides of banks, and fences (especially where the 

 earth is not very tenacious) are bared of the mould 

 which should entertain them, by that time the rains 

 and storms of one Winter have passed over them. In 

 Holland and Flanders, (where they have the goodliest 

 hedges of this kind about the counterscarps of their 



