MAY. 147 
when ordinary flower gardens are naked, or at best with the beds 
promiscuously filled with dwarf shrubs, which never look satisfactory, 
and would present a no less pleasing combination of colour during the 
pan season, with the outline of the figures tastefully relieved by 
owers. 
TAXUS. 

CULTURE OF THE VINE IN THE SOUTH OF IRELAND. 
Ara late meeting of the Royal Dublin Society, the following interesting 
paper was read by J. Knight Boswell, Esq., chairman of the horti- 
cultural committee. 
The Vine (Vitis vinifera) has a biography more ancient than the 
famed Cedar of Lebanon, or the Fig tree under the shade of which sat 
the fathers of eastern nations. ‘The earliest records which we have of 
husbandry treat of it: ‘‘And Noah began to be a husbandman, and 
planted a vineyard.” 
It is a native of the east, and is supposed to have come from the 
mountains on the borders of the Caspian Sea, where it is indigenous. 
Wine, the fermented juice of the Grape, is also of very ancient date, 
and was among the first oblations to the Divinity. Herodotus tells us 
that the Persians were very much addicted toits use. In the Homeric 
days mention is made of the wines of Thrace being mixed with honey. 
The Greeks and Romans used salt water with their wine, and flavoured 
it with resin and pitch, it being also necessary to dilute it largely with 
water, it having been thickened by heat. We make port wine with 
the assistance of logwood. The ancients were aware that rich, unctuous 
lands were unfavourable to the production of good wine—they chose 
light, porous soils, with an admixture of gravel and a substratum of 
rocky debris. They were also aware that wine produced on the slopes 
of dry hills was superior to the growth of the plains. The elder Cato, 
in his work on the Vine, says an extensive fertility 1s injurious to it, 
and that all that is subtracted from the wood is added to the fruit. 
The ancients as a rule never permitted the Vine to bear fruit until 
seven years old, the doctrine being that the Vine would perish if allowed 
to do so sooner. Pliny the naturalist enters very fully into the culti- 
vation of the Vine, and among much that is puerile and superstitious, 
we glean some useful information. He tells us the earlier the Vine is 
pruned the greater is the quantity of wood, and the later the pruning 
the more abundant is the fruit. Nearly all modes of out-door culture, 
as practised by moderns, were known to the ancients, with the exception 
of house culture, which is a modern invention. The Vine was some- 
times permitted to grow to man’s height, and supported by props: it 
also took the form of a stunted stem, standing of itself. In Africa it 
_was trailed along the ground; but the principal and most approved 
method was to train the Vine to Poplars and Elms from 20 to 30 feet 
high, one tree supporting as many as ten Vines, the pruning and 
management being often attended with loss of life, the ancients errone- 
ously believing that the best wine was made from the Grape that grew 
L 2 
