ards. In the
Roman time grapes abounded and wine was plenty, but the culture
disappeared after the Conquest. From the time of Henry IV. to Henry VIII.
vegetables were little used, but in Harrison's day the use of melons,
pompions, radishes, cucumbers, cabbages, turnips, and the like was
revived. They had beautiful flower-gardens annexed to the houses, wherein
were grown also rare and medicinal herbs; it was a wonder to see how many
strange herbs, plants, and fruits were daily brought from the Indies,
America and the Canaries. Every rich man had great store of flowers, and
in one garden might be seen from three hundred to four hundred medicinal
herbs. Men extol the foreign herbs to the neglect of the native, and
especially tobacco, "which is not found of so great efficacy as they
write." In the orchards were plums, apples, pears, walnuts, filberts; and
in noblemen's orchards store of strange fruit-apricots, almonds, peaches,
figs, and even in some oranges, lemons, and capers. Grafters also were at
work with their artificial mixtures, "dallying, as it were, with nature
and her course, as if her whole trade were perfectly known unto them: of
hard fruits they will make soft, of sour sweet, of sweet yet more
delicate; bereaving also some of their kernels, others of their cores,
and finally endowing them with the flavor of musk, amber, or sweet spices
at their pleasure." Gardeners turn annual into perpetual herbs, and such
pains are they at that they even used dish-water for plants. The Gardens
of Hesperides are surely not equal to these. Pliny tells of a rose that
had sixty leaves on one bud, but in 1585 there was a rose in Antwerp that
had one hundred and eighty leaves; and Harrison might have had a slip of
it for ten pounds, but he thought it a "tickle hazard." In his own little
garden, of not above three hundred square feet, he had near three hundred
samples, and not one of them of the common, or usually to be had.

Our kin beyond sea have always been stout eaters of solid food, and in
Elizabeth's time their tables were more plentifully laden than those of
any other nation. Harrison scientifically accounts for their inordinate
appetite. "The situation of our region," he says, "lying near unto the
north, does cause the heat of our stomachs to be of somewhat greater
force; therefore our bodies do crave a little more ample nourishment than
the inhabitants of the hotter regions are accustomed withal, whose
digestive force is n