68 A DISCOURSE 



ISIelons, asparagus, and most hasty growers, participate evidently of 

 the soil, and, therefore, we have already shewed how new and heady dung 

 contaminates ; and this is, amongst others, the reason why in the more 

 southern countries (where they are planted in the natural and unforced 

 mould) they are so racy, and superior in taste and flavour to ours. I 

 should, therefore, recommend the use of sheep-dung, well reduced, or 

 rather the ashes of burnt-straw, and the hotter dungs calcined, for some 

 trials to reform it ; or, as they do in Italy, mingle dust and earth ma- 

 nured with sheep-soil and wood-ashes : if, after all we have said, the 

 cause of our application of composts and dungs to these rarer and choice 

 productions be not to prevent the rains only ; for otherwise, too rich 

 soils impair the most delicious fruits, rather than improve them ; and 

 grapes and other fruits are sooner ripened which stand near the high- 

 ways, much beaten by passengers, than by all that you can lay to the 

 roots, or spread on the ground for that purpose, the dust investing both 

 the tree and fruit with a kind of refined soil, mellowed with the dews 

 and gentle showers which fall from heaven. 



To give some instances : roots, as we have shewed, desire deep gi'ound; 

 fruit-trees should never go deeper than the usual penetrations of the sun, 

 for no farther is the mould benign. Besides, they but too propensely 

 sink of themselves, especially bulbs of flowers, whose fibres easily draw 

 them down, and then they change their artificial and accidental beauty, 

 and (as we call it) degenerate ; but trees will grow and thrive, if planted 

 on the very surface, with little covering of the mould, so they be oft re- 

 freshed, and established against the wind. Besides, we find that even 

 the goodliest fruit (as weU as some timber-trees) have many times the 

 hardest footings with reasonable depth of earth. So little does it import 

 to have it profound, that, in soft and deeper sands, they thrive nothing 

 so well as on chalk and gravel, so long as the root can be kept from de- 

 scending ; in which case, you should (as we have shewed) bait the gi'ound 

 towards the surface, and keep the roots from gadding too far from the 

 stem, for the lower roots are frequently starved by the upper, which de- 

 vour the nourishment before it arrives at them. Thus gardeners should 

 sometimes humour their plants, cook and dress their foods to their appe- 

 tite, and as they can well digest ; but by no means sufier the roots of 

 fruit-trees, standards or mural, to be planted in dunged earth which is 

 not exceedingly well digested, and little different from the natural soil. 



