GENTLEMEN ADVENTURERS 
37 
ing had not left them quite indifferent to the possibili¬ 
ties of everything else. Figs, lemons, almonds, pome¬ 
granates, olives, ginger, sugar-cane, plantains and 
cassada or prickly pear are named as subjects of this 
testing; the first mentioned were an immediate success, 
evidently, for the garden of Mrs. Pierce at Jamestown, 
although only three or four acres in extent, yielded 
a hundred bushels in one year, not so many years 
later. 
A legal provision regarding the enclosure of land, 
adopted by the General Court in 1626, would seem to 
indicate that some of the grantees of the vast areas 
privately acquired, had undertaken to be exclusive with 
regard to their holdings. This provision stipulates 
that only those fields wherein crops grow, may be en¬ 
closed “with fence”; the rest, it declares, must be left 
as a range for cattle. And the instructions to Gov. 
Berkeley in 1641 provided that every colonist holding 
one hundred acres of land should establish a garden 
and orchard, carefully protected by a fence, ditch or 
hedge. Berkeley himself had fifteen hundred apple, 
peach, apricot, quince and other fruit trees, which must 
have been so protected. 
The fence probably most commonly used, is charac¬ 
teristic to-day of many parts of Virginia—the pictur¬ 
esque “rail fence,” most easily constructed and most 
readily taken down and moved to another place, when 
