How many of the lovely evergreens[1310] that abound in Greece were usually cultivated in a single garden, we possess no means of ascertaining, though all appear occasionally to have been called in to diversify the picture. The myrtle,[1311] whose deep blue berries were esteemed a delicacy,[1312] in some places rose into a tree, while elsewhere it was planted thick, and bent and fashioned into bowers,[1313] which, when sprinkled with its snowy blossoms, combined, perhaps, with those of the jasmine, the eglantine, and the yellow tufts of the broad-leaved philyrea,[1314] constituted some of the most beautiful objects in a Greek paradise. Thickets of the tamarisk,[1315] the strawberry-tree,[1316] the juniper, the box, the bay, the styrax, the andrachne, and the white-flowered laurel, in whose dark leaves the morning dew collects and glistens in the sun like so many tiny mirrors of burnished silver, varied the surface of the lawn, connecting the bowers, and the copses, and the flower beds, and the grassy slopes with those loftier piles of verdure, consisting of the pine tree, the smilax, the cedar, the carob, the maple,[1317] the ash, the elm tree, the platane,[1318] and the evergreen oak which here and there towered in the grounds. In many places the vine shot up among the ranges of elms or platanes, and stretched its long twisted arm from trunk to trunk, like so many festoons of intermingled leaves and tendrils, and massive clusters of golden or purple grapes.[1319] Alternating, perhaps, with the lovely favourite of Dionysos, the blue and yellow clematis[1320] suspended their living garlands around the stems, or along the boughs of the trees, in union or contrast with the dodder, or the honeysuckle, or the delicate and slender briony. And, if perchance a silver fir, with its bright yellow flowers,[1321] formed part of the group, large pendant clusters of mistletoe, the food sometimes of the labouring ox,[1322] might frequently be seen swinging thick among its branches. In some grounds was probably cultivated the quercus suber,[1323] or cork tree, with bark four or five inches thick, triennially stripped off,[1324] after which it grows again with renewed vigour. Occasionally, where streams and rivulets[1325] found their way through the grounds, the black and white poplar, the willow, and the lentiscus, with a variety of tufted reeds, crowded about the margin, here and there shading and concealing the waters. ----- Footnote 1310: Theoph. Hist. Plant. i. 9. 3. Footnote 1311: Cf. Clus. Hist. Rar. Plant. i. 43. p. 65. Footnote 1312: Plat. De Rep. t. vi. p. 85. The berry, both of the myrtle and the laurel, assumed, we are told, a black colour in the garden of Antandros.—Theophrast. Hist. Plant. ii. 2. 6. Footnote 1313: Hemsterhuis, Annot. ad Poll. ix. 49. p. 943. Cf. Dion. Chrysost. i. 273. Footnote 1314: Sibthorp. Flor. Græc. t. i. tab. 2, tab. 367, tab. 374, seq. Footnote 1315: Theoph. Hist. Plant. i. 9. 3.