March 11. 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
WEEKLY CALENDAR. 
363 I 
M 
D 
W 
D 
MARCH 11—17, 1852. 
Weather 
| Barometer. 
near Lo 
Thermo. 
N D ON 
Wind. 
IN 1851. 
Rain in In. 
San 
Rises. 
Sun 
Sets. 
Moon 
R. & S. 
Moon’s 
Age. 
Clock 
bef. Sun. 
Day of 
Year. 
11 
Th 
Gregory. 
29 970 — 29.934 
48—24 
N.W. 
25 a. 6 
56 a. 5 
morn. 
20 
10 
7 
71 
12 
F 
29.737 — 29.629 
42—29 
S. 
23 
22 
58 
1 11 
€ 
22 
9 
51 
72 
13 
s 
3 Sunday in Lent. 
29.754 — 29.709 
50—24 
W. 
_ 
20 
59 
2 22 
9 
34 
73 
u 
Sun 
29.813 — 29.776 
53—34 
s.w. 
70 
18 
VI 
3 23 
23 
9 
17 
74 
15 
M 
Laurel flowers. 
29.748 —29.687 
46—29 
N. 
37 
15 
3 
4 12 
24 
9 
0 
75 
it) 
Tu 
Ephemerae Bisetae seen. 
29.848 — 29.832 
52—26 
N.W. 
13 
4 
4 53 
25 
8 
43 
76 
17 
W 
St. Patrick. 
29.739 — 29.556 
44—35 
E. 
30 
11 
6 
5 25 
26 
8 
25 
77 
Meteorology of the Week. —At 
Chiswick, from observations during the last twenty-five years, the average highest and lowest tempera- 
tures ot these days are 50.9 U and 34.5° respectively. The greatest heat, 67 0 , occurred on the 17th in 183(3; and the lowest cold, 
in 1850. During the period 106 days were fine, and on 69 rain fell. 
17° 
on the 17 th 
Ridiculous as was the excessive display in their religious 
exercises made by many of the Puritans of the seventeenth 
century, yet much allowance ought to he made, not only for 
j the circumstances in which they were living, but still more 
I for the fervid piety which actuated no inconsiderable portion 
of their number. We may justly deprecate the bad taste, 
and the worse judgment, which allowed whole sentences of 
scripture to be adopted as their baptismal names ; we may 
with equal propriety condemn the blasphemy of inscribing 
cannon with such sentences as ‘‘Clear the way of the Lord;” 
and we may pity and pass aside the jargon of mis-applied 
scriptural quotations, which often disfigured and weighed 
down the literature of the age. All this is open to satire, 
and to graver reprehension, but let us not forget that to 
those Puritans we owe a debt of gratitude not to be effaced 
by our conviction of their follies and eccentricities. This is 
not the page on which to trace out the items of that debt 
minutely, but we will remind our readers of two of the 
most prominent. To the Puritans we are indebted for 
Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and Austen’s Spiritual Use of an 
Orchard. Of the first work we need say nothing, for it has 
been more read, passed through more numerous editions, 
and has been more frequently translated, than any other 
book, not from the pen of an inspired writer, but it is needful 
to say to many of our readers, that Austen’s work, though 
much less known, is worthy to be placed upon the same 
shelf. 
Ralph Austen was a nurseryman and orchardist, resident 
at Oxford, but of far higher attainments and of education 
superior to those who then usually followed that business. 
That he was too excellent a man for even Anthony Wood to 
vituperate, is sufficient high praise, when we know that he 
was not a member of the episcopal church. “ In the latter 
end of July, 1052,” says old Anthony, “ Ralph Austen, 
deputy registrary to the visitors for William Woodliouse, and 
registrary afterwards in his own right, was entered a student 
into the public library, to the end that he might find ma¬ 
terials for the composition of a book which he was then 
meditating. That book afterwards he published in 1653, 
and entitled it A Treatise of Fruit Trees, shewing the manner 
of grafting, planting, pruning, and ordering of them in all 
respects according to new and easy 7'ules of experience. It is 
very probable that the said book might have been printed 
more than twice (it was printed four times), had not the 
author added to it another treatise as big as the former, en¬ 
titled The Spiritual Use of an Orchard, which being aU 
divinity, and nothing therein of the practical part of garden¬ 
ing, many, therefore, did refuse to buy it. This Mr. 
Austen, who was either a Presbyterian or Independant, I 
know not whether, was a very useful man in his generation, 
and spent all his time in Oxford to his death, in planting 
gardens there, and near it, in grafting, inoculating, raising 
fruit-trees, &c. He was born in Staffordshire, and dying in 
his house in the parish of St. Peter-in-the-Bailey, in Oxford, 
was buried in the church belonging thereunto, in the aisle 
joining on the south side of the chancel, on the 26tli of 
October, 1070, after he had been a practicer in gardening and 
planting fruit-trees fifty years.” We hoped to have found 
his resting place thus accurately specified by his biographer, 
but the church was rebuilt in 1720, and no memento of him 
remains. Our encpiiries after the locality of his garden 
have been equally unavailing. In consulting the writings of 
his other contemporaries we have been more successful, and 
from them we find that to the third edition of his Treatise 
on Fruit Trees, published in 1605, Austen also added 
Notes on Lord Bacon's Observations and Experiments on 
Vegetables. Nor did these comprise all his writings, for 
“ now lately,” says Anthony Lawrence, writing in 1677, 
“ he published a new book, under this title— A Dialogue 
between the Husbandman and Fruit Trees in his Nurseries, 
Orchards, and Gardens. In which are discovered many useful 
and profitable observations and experiments in nature, in the 
order ing of fruit-trees; devoutly instructing good husbands to 
adorn their own country, and justly blaming idle and volup¬ 
tuous prodigals as enemies to their own country. By Ralph 
Austen, practiser at least 50 years, in the art of planting fruit- 
trees. 1076. All from Oxford, and this plain writer, who 
pretends to no glory in rhetoric, both by his labours and ex¬ 
periments has done more good for Oxford, and thence for 
England, than is yet done by many gaudy gallants, who spend 
more in a day, than this honest nurseryman can spare in a 
year.” 
“ In these respects we are obliged to attribute more to 
a laborious and skilful nurseryman in his homespun rai¬ 
ments of English manufacture, than to an idle prodigal, 
with his sumptuous equipage of exotic embroidery. In 
regard of Mr. Austen’s merit towards Oxford and the public, 
a worthy friend hath devised a monument for him. It is in 
great Roman letters of gold, upon a black marble, the best 
touch; the figure round, agreeable to the roundness of this 
globe; the diameter three feet, both for modesty, and that 
the largeness of the letters may fill up the area.” 
f/ D. O. M. S. \\ 
/ RADULPHUS AUSTEN \ 
OPTIMA POMORUM 
VINA PRIMUS ARTE ET 
V INDUSTRIA OXONI/12 ) 
\\ PARAVIT, CIRCA A.D. Ji 
(Ralph Austen, by art and industry, first introduced the best 
wine of Apples to Oxford.) 
“ It is so newly modern,” adds Mr. Lawrence, “ to raise 
cider to excel the wine of many provinces nearer to the sun, 
as to be generally thought incredible, yet it is certain Mr. 
Austen was busy at his experiments in preparing Redstreaks 
for Oxford, long before vulgar cider was to be gotten there 
for money. And he hath now very lately taken in twenty- 
seven acres of ground, to enlarge his former nurseries, and 
for new plantations.” Austen was a llorist as well as a 
fruitist; for Rea, in his Flora published in 1665, mentions 
an auricula raised by him, and another named after his wife. 
The design, and it is most excellently wrought out, of 
The Spiritual Use of an Orchard, is thus told in the preface. 
“ As I have planted many natural fruit-trees for the good of 
the commonwealth, so have I taken some spiritual cions or 
grafts from them (I mean several propositions drawn from 
observations in nature), and bound them up in a bundle, 
and sent them abroad for the good of the Church of God; 
and if men will accept of them, and be willing to engraft 
them in their own gardens (their hearts and minds), by the 
No. CLXXX., Vol. VII, 
