Visited the gardens with my taleb as _cicerone_. Was much gratified with the rural ramble, although there is nothing remarkable to be seen. The three principal productions are dates, of which there is a great variety, some thirty or forty different sorts[56]; barley and _ghusub_[57]. The ghusub is grown in the Autumn and the barley in the Spring; in this way two crops of corn are reaped in the year. A little wheat is now and then grown, but does not thrive. The native date is the _madghou_ (‮مدغو‬) which is also common in Seenawan and Derge. It is small and filbert-shaped, of a black colour, very pleasant when fresh, but when dry very indifferent. I saw no black dates in any other parts of The Sahara. The gardens furnish besides a few vegetables and fruits, such as pomegranates, apricots, peaches, almonds, olives, melons, pumpkins, tomatas, onions, and peppers, a few grape-trees and fig-trees in the choicest gardens, but all in small quantities. There is scarcely a flower or fancy tree but the _tout_. No person of my acquaintance, except my turjeman, showed much fancy for botany. He had brought an aloe from Tripoli, and planted it in his garden. It is the only one. He has another tree or two besides, which nobody else has. The merchants have brought the varieties of the date-palm from the different oases of The Sahara. Nearly every householder has a garden, and some several. Sometimes a date plantation is divided between two or three families, each cultivating and gathering the fruits of his pet choice palm. Herbage is grown in the gardens for fattening the sheep. Pounded date-stones both fatten sheep and camels. In summer the gardens are intolerable, but in winter deliciously pleasant. Sheikh Makouran is the largest landed-proprietor. He has seventeen gardens; "nearly half the country," as a person observed. So Europe is not the only place in the world where there is such an unequal division of the land. The gardens are small, and the whole number is some two hundred and odd, only the half of which are regularly watered from the Great Spring. As the people can never depend upon rain, the whole culture is conducted on irrigation. The Ghadamsee garden-gate, of all the absurdities of inconvenience is the greatest I ever met with. It is scarcely large enough for a small sheep to enter. Every person entering a garden must not only stoop but crawl through the gate. It is fortunate there are no lusty people here, all being bony and wiry like the Arabs. Not being dependant on rain, the gardens only suffer from the locusts, and now and then a blighting wind. In the Spring of this year these insect marauders passed over the oasis and made a pillage of the date blossoms for thirty days, besides doing much damage to the barley. I encountered a flight of the same horde, which emerged from The Desert and then took to sea, and were scattered over to Malta and Sicily by the wind, when I was travelling from Tunis to the isle of Jerbah late in the Spring.