it would yield excellent stocks to graff and transplant: And thus any larger plot, by plowing and cross-plowing the ground, and sowing it with all sorts of forest-seeds; breaking and harrowing the clods, and cleansing it from weeds with the haugh, (till the plants over-top them) a very profitable grove may be rais’d, and yield magazin of singular advantage, to furnish the industrious planter. 5. But Columella has another expedient for the raising of our _spinetum_, by rubbing the now mature hips and haws, ashen-keys, &c. into the crevices of bass-ropes, or wisps of straw, and then burying them in a trench: Whether way you attempt it, they must (so soon as they peep, and as long as they require it) be sedulously cleans’d of the weeds; which, if in beds for transplantation, had need be at the least three or four years; by which time even your seedlings will be of stature fit to remove; for I do by no means approve of the vulgar præmature planting of sets, as is generally us’d throughout England; which is to take such only as are the very smallest, and so to crowd them into three or four files, which are both egregious mistakes. 6. Whereas it is found by constant experience, that plants as big as ones thumb, set in the posture, and at the distance which we spake of in the horn-beam; that is, almost perpendicular (not altogether, because the rain should not get in ’twixt the rind and wood) and single, or at most, not exceeding a double row, do prosper infinitely, and much out-strip the densest and closest ranges of our trifling sets, which make but weak shoots, and whose roots do but hinder each other, and for being couch’d in that posture, on the sides of banks, and fences (especially where the earth is not very tenacious) are bared of the mould which should entertain them, by that time the rains and storms of one Winter have passed over them. In Holland and Flanders, (where they have the goodliest hedges of this kind about the counterscarps of their invincible fortifications, to the great security of their musketiers upon occasion) they plant them according to my description, and raise fences so speedily, and so impenetrable, that our best are not to enter into the comparison. Yet, that I may not be wanting to direct such as either affect the other way, or whose grounds may require some bank of earth, as ordinarily the verges of copp’ces, and other inclosures do; you shall by line, cast up your foss of about three foot broad, and about the same depth, provided your mould hold it; beginning first to turn the turf, upon which, be careful to lay some of the best earth to bed your quick in, and there lay, or set the plants; two in a foot space is sufficient; being diligent to procure such as are fresh gathered, streight, smooth, and well rooted; adding now and then, at equal spaces of twenty or thirty foot, a young oakling or elm-sucker, ash, or the like, which will come in time (especially in plain countries) to be