accidents, more hereafter. 11. If you affect to see your cypress in standard, and grow wild, (which may in time come to be of a large substance, fit for the most immortal of timber, and indeed are the least obnoxious to the rigours of our Winters, provided you never clip or disbranch them) plant of the reputed male-sort; it is a tree which will prosper wonderfully; and where the ground is hot and gravelly, though (as we said) he be nothing so beautiful; and it is of this, that the Venetians make their greatest profit. 12. I have already shew’d how this tree is to be rais’d from the seed; but there was another method amongst the Ancients, who (as I told you) were wont to make great plantations of them for their timber; I have practis’d it my self, and therefore describe it. 13. If you receive your seed in the roundish small nuts, which use to be gather’d thrice a year, (but seldom ripening with us) expose them to the sun till they gape, or near a gentle fire, or put them in warm water, (as was directed in those of cedar) by which means the seeds will be easily shaken out; for if you have them open before, they do not yield you half their crop: About the beginning of April (or before, if the weather be showery) prepare an even bed, which being made of fine earth, clap down with your spade, as gardeners do for purselain seed (of old they roll’d it with some stone, or cylinder); upon this strew your seeds pretty thick; then sift over them some more mould, somewhat better than half an inch in height: Keep them duly watered after sunset, unless the season do it for you; and after one year’s growth, (for they will be an inch high in little more than two months) you may transplant them where you please: If in the nursery, set them at a foot or 18 inches distance in even lines, kept watered and moist, ’till they are well rooted, and fit to be remov’d. In watering them, I give you this caution (which may also serve you for most tender and delicate seeds) that you bedew them rather with a broom, or spergitory, than hazard the beating them out with the common watering-pot; and when they are well come up, be but sparing of water: Be sure likewise that you cleanse them when the weeds are very young and tender, lest instead of purging, you quite eradicate your cypress: We have spoken of watering, and indeed whilst young, if well follow’d, they will make a prodigious advance. When that long and incomparable walk of cypress at Frascati near Rome, was first planted, they drew a small stream (and indeed _irrigare_ is properly thus, _aquam inducere riguis_ (_i. e._) in small gutters and rills) by the foot of it, (as the water there is in abundance tractable) and made it (as I was credibly inform’d) arrive to seven or eight foot height in one year; (which does not agree with the epithet, _lenta cupressus_); but with us, we may not be too prodigal; since, being once well taken, they thrive best in our sandy, light and warmest grounds, whence Cardan