tree with all the former advantages; if sparing the shaft altogether, you diligently cut away all the forked branches, reserving only such as radiate directly from the body, which being shorn, and clipt in due season, will render the tree very beautiful; and though more subject to obey the shaking winds, yet the natural spring of it, does immediately redress it, without the least discomposure; and this is a secret worth the learning of gardeners, who subject themselves to the trouble of stakes and binding, which is very inconvenient. Thus likewise may you form them into hedges, topiary works, limits and boundary, _metas imitata cupressus_; or by sowing the seeds in a shallow furrow, and plucking up the supernumeraries, where they come too close and thick: For in this work, it will suffice to leave them within a foot of each other; and when they are risen about a yard in height, (which may be to the half of your palisado) cut off their tops, as you are taught, and keep the sides clipp’d, that they ascend but by degrees, and thicken at the bottom as they climb. Thus, they will present you (in half a dozen or eight years) with incomparable hedges; because they are perpetually green, able to resist the winds better than most which I know, the holly only excepted, which indeed has no peer. 10. For, when I say winds, I mean their fiercest gusts, not their cold: For though it be said, _brumâque illæsa cupressus_, and that indeed no frost impeaches them (for they grow even on the snowy tops of Ida,) yet our cruel eastern winds do sometimes mortally invade them which have been late clipp’d, seldom the untouch’d or that were dressed in the Spring only: The effects of March and April winds (in the Year 1663, and 1665) accompanied with cruel frosts, and cold blasts, for the space of more than two months, night and day, did not amongst near a thousand cypresses (growing in my garden) kill above three or four, which for being very late cut to the quick (that is, the latter end of October) were raw of their wounds, took cold, and gangreen’d; some few others which were a little smitten towards the tops, might have escaped all their blemishes, had my gardener capp’d them but with a wisp of hay or straw, as in my absence I commanded. As for the frost of those winters (than which I believe there was never known a more cruel and deadly piercing since England had a name) it did not touch a cypress of mine, till it join’d forces with that destructive wind: Therefore for caution, clip not your cypresses late in Autumn, and cloath them (if young) against these winds; for the frosts they only discolour them, but seldom, or never hurt them, as by long experience I have found; nor altogether despair of the resurrection of a cypress, subverted by the wind; for some have redress’d themselves; and one (as Ziphilinus mentions) that rose the very next day; which happening about the reign of the emperor Vespasian, was esteem’d an happy omen: But of such