Mode of Managing Slrai&herries . £93 
this country : the name of the fruit bears testimony in fa- 
vour of this conjecture; for the plant has no relation to 
straw in any other way, and no other European language 
applies the idea of straw in any shape to the name of the 
berry, or to the plant that bears it. 
When sir Joseph Banks came to Spring Grove, in 
1779? he found this practice in the garden: John Smith, 
the gardener, well known among his brethern as a man 
of more than ordinary abilities in the profession, had used 
it there many years ; he learned it soon after he came to 
London from Scotland ; probably at the Neat Houses, 
where he first worked among the market gardeners, it 
is therefore clearly an old practice, though now almost 
obsolete. 
Its use in preserving a crop is very extensive: it 
shades the roots from the sun; prevents the waste of 
moisture by evaporation, and, consequently, in dry times, 
when watering is necessary, makes a less quantity of wa- 
ter suffice than would be used if the sun could act imme- 
diately on the surface of the mould ; besides, it keeps 
the leaning fruit from resting on the earth, and gives the 
whole an air of neatness as well as an effect of real 
cleanliness, which should never be wanting in a gentle- 
man’s garden. 
The strawberry beds in that garden at Spring Grove, 
which has been measured for the purpose of ascertaining 
the expense incurred by this method of management, are 
about seventy-five feet long, and five feet wide, each con- 
taining three rows of plants, and of course requiring four 
rows of straw to be laid under them. The whole con- 
sists of six hundred feet of beds, or eighteen hundred feet 
of strawberry plants, of different sorts, in rows. The 
strawing of these beds consumed this year, 1806, the long 
straw of twenty-six trusses, for the short straw being as 
good for litter as the long straw, but less applicable to 
