Natural History — Book XVII

Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder · a new plain-English translation from the Latin

1| The nature of the trees that grow of their own accord on land and sea has been described; there remain those that are produced by art and human ingenuity, rather than truly born. But first it occurs to me to wonder that the trees we have reported as held, in their scarcity, in common ownership with wild beasts (man fighting it out with the beasts over the fallen fruit, and with the birds as well over the fruit still hanging), should have come to command such high prices as luxuries. The most famous example, as I at least judge, is that of Lucius

2| Crassus and Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus. Crassus was among the foremost orators of the Roman name. He had a magnificent house, but that of Quintus Catulus on the same Palatine, the man who routed the Cimbri together with Gaius Marius, was considerably finer; and by far the most beautiful in that age, by everyone's agreement, was the house of Gaius Aquilius on the Viminal hill, a Roman knight more famous for it even than for his knowledge of civil law. Yet it was Crassus' own house that was thrown in his face.

3| Both men, of the most noble families, held the censorship together after their consulships in the year 662 from the founding of the city, a censorship full of quarrels because of the dissimilarity of their characters. At that time Gnaeus Domitius, vehement as he was by nature and further inflamed by hatred, which is most voracious when it springs from rivalry, rebuked him severely for living in such costly style while he was censor, and kept offering 6,000,000 sesterces for his house.

4| And Crassus, always ready-witted and adroit with a nimble humour, answered that he would sell it to him, with six trees excepted. When Domitius declared that he would not buy it for even a single denarius if they were taken away, Crassus said: "So which of us, I ask you, Domitius, sets a grave example and deserves to be marked down by his own censorship: I, who live in a civil manner in a house that came to me by inheritance, or you, who value six trees at 6,000,000?"

5| These were lotus trees, luxuriant in the wide shade of their branches; Caecina Largus, one of the leading men, used often to show them off in his house when I was young, and (since we have spoken of the longest life span of trees too) they lasted, kept green and youthful by tending, until the fires of the emperor Nero, had not that emperor hastened the death even of trees.

6| And lest anyone should think that Crassus' house was otherwise cheap, and that there was nothing in it for Domitius to bid for in the quarrel except the trees, Crassus had already set up in the atrium of that house 6 columns of Hymettian marble, brought in to decorate the stage during his aedileship, at a time when there were not yet any marble columns in public buildings. So recent is our opulence; and so much more distinction did trees then bring to houses that without them Domitius would not even have kept to the price set by his enmity.

7| The ancients took surnames from trees as well: Frondicius was the name of that soldier who performed brilliant exploits against Hannibal by swimming across the Volturnus with foliage set on his head; and the Licinian family took the name Stolo. Stolo is the name for a useless shoot on the trees themselves, and so the stripping of such shoots, when it was invented, gave the first Stolo his name. The care of trees was also a concern of the ancient laws, and it was provided in the Twelve Tables that anyone who had wrongfully cut down another man's trees should pay 25 in bronze for each one. What do we suppose? Did those men, who had valued even fruit-bearing trees at so much, believe that trees would come to the valuation mentioned above?

8| No less a marvel lies in fruit, now that around the outskirts of the city the annual crop of many trees is sold for 2,000 sesterces each, a greater return from a single tree than the ancients had from their estates. For this reason grafting was devised, and adulteries even among trees, so that not even fruit should grow for the poor.

9| So now we shall say in what way chiefly so large a revenue may be drawn from them, intending to set out the true and complete method of cultivation; and for that reason we shall not deal with commonplace matters, nor with what we have noted to be agreed, but with what is uncertain and doubtful, where people most often go wrong. For it is not our way to affect exactness in superfluous matters. But first of all we shall speak [in general and] in common of the things that concern all kinds of trees, with regard to climate and soil.

10| Trees delight most of all in the Aquilo; its breath makes them denser and more luxuriant and firmer in their timber. Most people make a mistake in this, since in vineyards the props should not be set against this wind, and this precaution should be kept only against the north. Indeed, cold at the right season contributes very much to the firmness of trees, and that is how they bud best; otherwise, if the south winds caress them, they grow weary, and even more so when they are in flower.

11| For if rains follow immediately after they have finished flowering, the fruit is lost altogether, so much so that almonds and pears lose their young fruit even if the weather has simply been cloudy or a south wind has blown. Rain around the time of the Pleiades is most hostile to the vine and the olive, since that is when they conceive. This is that four-day period which is decisive for olives, this the critical moment of foul cloudy weather from the south of which we have spoken. Crops too ripen worse in days of south wind, but more quickly.

12| Those colds are harmful that come with north winds or at the wrong times. A winter of Aquilo winds is indeed most useful to all crops. And the reason why rain is to be wished for at that time is obvious: it is natural that trees, emptied by bearing their fruit and weakened as well by the loss of their leaves, should be greedily hungry, and their food is rain.

13| For this reason a mild winter, which leads the trees to conceive immediately after giving up their fruit, that is, to bud, and then to be exhausted by flowering a second time, is believed from experience to be very harmful. Indeed, if several years go on like this in succession, the trees themselves even die, since no one doubts the penalty that falls on those who labour under hunger. So whoever said that clear winters should be prayed for was not making his prayers on behalf of the trees;

14| Nor do rains at the solstices profit vines; the saying that harvests grow more abundant with winter dust was spoken out of the fertility of an exuberant wit. Otherwise the prayers common to trees and crops are that snows should lie a long time. The cause is not only that they shut in and press down the breath of the earth that would vanish by exhalation, and drive it back into the strength of the crops and the roots, but also that they supply moisture gradually, pure besides and very light, since snow is the foam of heavenly waters.

15| So the moisture from them, not all at once gorging and washing away, but dripping as it is thirsted for, as if from an udder, nourishes everything, because it does not flood. The earth too ferments in that way, and full of itself, not exhausted by the sowings that give milk, when the season opens, smiles with the warm hours. Thus grain above all grows fat, except where the air is always warm, as in Egypt. For continuity and habit itself bring about what moderation does elsewhere, and it profits most wherever there is nothing to harm.

16| In the greater part of the world, when early buds run out, called forth by the indulgence of the sky, they are burned up by the cold that follows. For this reason late winters are harmful, to wild trees too, which suffer even more, being oppressed by their own shade and without the help of any remedy, since in wild trees it is not possible to clothe the tender shoots with twisted straw.

17| So the waters are in season, first in the winter rains, then those before the budding; the third time is when they are bringing the fruit on, and not straightway, but when the offspring is already strong. Trees that hold their fruits longer and need longer nourishment, for these the late waters are useful too, as for the vine, the olive, the pomegranates. These rains, however, are desired by trees of each kind in a different way, as they ripen at different times. Therefore you may see some harmed by the same rains, some helped, even within the same kind, just as in pears the winter ones ask for rain on one day, the early ones on another, though all alike desire the winter season, but before the budding.

18| The reasoning that makes the north wind more useful than the south also prefers inland places to maritime ones—for they are for the most part colder—and mountainous to level, and night rains to day rains. Crops enjoy the waters more when the sun does not at once carry them off.

19| Connected with this is the reasoning about the situation of vineyards and tree-supported vines, to what quarters they ought to look. Virgil condemned planting toward the setting, and some have preferred it so rather than toward the rising. I observe that the south is approved by most, and I do not think that any fixed rule can be laid down in this. Skill must be guided by the nature of the soil, by the character of the place, by the habits of each climate.

20| In Africa for vineyards to look to the south is both useless to the vine and unhealthy for the farmer, since the country itself lies under the southern region; so there he who plants toward the west or north will best mix the soil with the climate. Since Virgil disapproves the west, there seems to be no doubt left about the north. And yet in Italy this side of the Alps it has been found that, where vineyards are for the most part so placed, none are more fertile.

21| Winds too count for much in the reckoning. In the province of Narbonensis, in Liguria, and in part of Etruria, to plant facing the circius is thought ignorance, and to take it aslant is thought foresight. For it tempers the summers there, but with such violence for the most part that it carries off roofs.

22| Some compel the sky to obey the earth, so that what is planted in dry soils looks to the east and the north, what in moist to the south. Nor do they fail to borrow reasons from the vines themselves: in cold places by planting early ones, so that ripeness may precede the frost; the fruits and vines that hate dew, opposite the east, so that the sun at once carries it off; those that love it, toward the west or even the north, so that they may enjoy it longer.

23| Nearly all the rest, following the reasoning of nature, have advised placing vines and trees turned to the north. Democritus thinks that fruit so grown becomes more fragrant too. We have spoken of the situation of the north wind and the other winds in the second volume, and shall say more of the heavenly matters in the next. Meanwhile a plain proof of healthiness appears, since in those that even look to the south the leaves always fall earlier. There is a similar cause in maritime places.

24| In some places the breath of the sea is harmful, in very many the same nourishes. For some crops it is pleasant to look on the seas from far off, but for the breath of salt to be brought nearer is useless. The reasoning about rivers and pools is similar. By their mists they either scorch or cool the burning heat. The plants we have mentioned delight in shade and even in cold. Therefore experiments are best trusted.

25| After the sky the next thing is to speak of the reasoning about the earth, in no easier handling, since the same does not suit trees and crops for the most part, nor is dark soil, such as Campania has, everywhere best for vines, or that which breathes out thin mists, nor red ochre, praised by many. Chalk in the land of the Pompeian Albenses and clay they put before all kinds for vineyards, although very rich, which is an exception in that kind. In turn white sand in the Ticinian country, and in many places black, and likewise red, even mixed with rich earth, is unfruitful.

26| The proofs of those who judge also often deceive. Soil is not necessarily rich in which tall trees flourish, except for those trees. For what is taller than the fir? Yet what other could have lived in the same place? Nor have luxuriant pastures always the mark of rich soil. For what is more praised than the pastures of Germany? Yet immediately beneath lies sand, under the thinnest skin of turf.

27| Nor is the earth always watery in which the herbs are tall, nor, by Hercules, more than that which is rich and clings to the fingers, which is shown in clays. No earth thrown back into the pits fills them, so that in this way dense and loose soil can be detected, and all of it covers iron with rust. Nor is it detected as heavier or lighter than the proper weight. For what weight of earth can be understood as proper? Nor is that brought down by rivers always to be praised, since some crops grow old with water.

28| But neither is the soil that is praised felt to be useful for long, except to the willow. Among the proofs is the thickness of the stubble, so great otherwise in the Leborine, the famous plain of Campania, that they use it in place of wood. But that soil, wherever it is hard to work and difficult to till, afflicts the farmer almost more sharply by its good qualities than it could by its faults.

29| And the carbunculus, as the earth is called, seems to be improved by intense care. For tufa, of a crumbling nature, is sought even by authors. Virgil too does not disapprove for vines the kind that bears fern. Salty lands are believed better for many things, and safer from the faults of animals born in them. Nor are hills stripped by work if one digs skilfully, nor do all plains receive less sun and breeze than the work requires, and we have said that some vines feed on frosts and mists. In all things there are certain secrets in the depth, and each must be seen through with its own heart.

30| What of the fact that even what has been judged and long proved is often changed? In Thessaly around Larisa, when the lake was let out, that region became colder, and the olives which had been there before ceased, and likewise the vines are scorched, which was not so before [….] Aenos felt it when the Hebrus was brought up, and around Philippi the region, dried by cultivation, changed its climate. But in the Syracusan country an immigrant farmer, the ground stripped of stones, lost his crops in the mud, until he threw the stones back. In Syria they press a light plough in a thin furrow, because rock lies beneath, scorching the seed in summer.

31| Already in some places there are similar immoderate effects of heat and of cold. Thrace is fertile in crops through cold, Africa and Egypt through heats. In Chalcia, an island of the Rhodians, there is a certain place so fruitful that they reap barley sown in its season and, when it is gathered, sow it straight away and reap it with the other crops. Gravelly soil is most suited to olives at Venafrum, the richest in Baetica. Pucine wines are ripened on rock, Caecuban vines stand wet in the Pomptine marshes. So great is the variety and difference of the proofs and of the soil.

32| Caesar Vopiscus, pleading a case before the censors, said that the plains of Rosia were the udder of Italy, in which poles left the day before were covered by the grass, but they are approved only for pasture. Nature, however, did not will us to be untaught, and made faults confessed even where she had not made good qualities certain. Wherefore we shall first speak of the faults.

33| Bitter earth [I would approve] is shown by its black and degenerate herbs, cold earth by what grows shrivelled, marshy earth likewise by things mournful, red ochre by the eye, and clay, very difficult to work, and whatever loads hoes or ploughshares with huge clods, although what is adverse to the work is not also adverse to the crop; likewise on the contrary ashy soil and white sand. For barren land is easily detected by its dense callus even with one stroke of a spade.

34| Cato defines the faults briefly and in his own manner: Beware of carious earth, and do not drive wagon or cattle over it. What do we think is so greatly dreaded by him under this name, that he almost forbids even footsteps? Let us refer it to the decay of wood, and we shall find the faults he so much abominates: of the dry, the hollow, the rough, the greying, the eaten-away, the pumice-like.

35| He said more by one expression than any abundance of speech could set out. For by the interpretation of faults there is a certain earth that is an old woman, not by age (which can be understood to be none in it), but by its own nature, and therefore barren for everything and weak.

36| The same man judges the best land to be a plain running from the foot of the mountains toward the south, which is the situation of all Italy, and the earth tender, which is called dark. This, then, will be the best both for work and for sowing. Let one but grasp that tender is said with a marvellous meaning, and whatever ought to be wished for will be found in that word. That earth is of moderate richness,

37| soft and easy to cultivate, neither wet nor thirsty. That which gleams after the plough, such as Homer, the fountainhead of all genius, said was wrought by the god on the shield, and added the marvel of its blackening, although it was made of gold. That which the greedy birds seek fresh, following the plough, and the crows gnawing the very footprints of the ploughman. Let the opinion of luxury also be given in this place, and at any rate some of it to the purpose.

38| Cicero, the other light of learning, says: Those perfumes are better which taste of earth than those which taste of saffron. For he preferred to say this rather than smell. It is so indeed, that earth will be best which tastes of perfumes.

39| But if we must be reminded what that smell of earth is that is sought, it happens often even when it is at rest toward sunset, in a place where the rainbows have let down their heads, and when after continuous dryness it has been soaked by rain. Then it sends out that breath of its own, divine, conceived from the sun, to which no sweetness can be compared. It must come from earth that is stirred up, and once found will deceive no one, and will judge best of the smell of the earth. Such is nearly the smell in new fields where an old wood has been cut, which is praised by consent.

40| And in bearing crops, indeed, the same land is understood to be more useful whenever it has rested with cultivation suspended, which is not done in vineyards, and it must be chosen the more carefully, lest the opinion be shown true of those who have already judged the land of Italy to be worn out.

41| Ease of working is a matter, in some kinds, of the climate as well, and some land cannot be ploughed after rains, growing sticky through the fault of its richness. On the contrary, in Byzacium in Africa we have seen that plain, fertile a hundred and fifty-fold, which in dry weather no bulls can plough, split after rains by a cheap little ass, with an old woman on the other side of the yoke drawing the share. For to mend earth with earth, as some prescribe, by throwing rich earth over thin, or thin and drinking-in earth over moist and over-rich, is the work of madness. What can he hope who tills such land?

42| There is another way, which Britain and Gaul have found, of feeding the earth with itself, a kind they call marga. A denser fertility is understood in it, and certain fats of the earth, like the glands in bodies, the kernel of richness there thickening itself. The Greeks have not omitted this either—for what is untried by them?—they call it leucargillon, a white clay, which they use in the Megarian country, but only in damp and cold earth.

43| That which enriches the Gauls and Britains it is fitting to describe with care. There had been two kinds; more have lately begun to be worked, as ingenuity advances. For there is white, red, dove-coloured, clayey, tufa-like, sandy. By nature it is twofold, rough or rich; the trials of each are in the hand. Its use is likewise twofold: either it nourishes crops only, or the same also pasture.

44| It nourishes crops, the tufa-like and the white, if found among springs, fertile without limit, but rough to handle; if too much is thrown on, it burns the soil. Next is the red, which is called acaunumarga, with a stone mixed through earth that is fine and sandy. The stone is broken up in the field itself, and in the first years the stubble is cut with difficulty because of the stones; yet, being so light, it is carried in at half the expense of the others. It is sprinkled thinly; they think salt is mixed with it. Either of these kinds, once thrown on, is good for 50 years in the abundance of crops and of pasture.

45| Of those that are felt to be rich, the chief is the white. It has several kinds: the most biting we have mentioned above. The second kind of white is silver chalk. It is sought from deep down, pits being driven for the most part to a hundred feet, with a narrow mouth, the vein spreading within, as in mines. Britain uses this most. It lasts 80 years, and there is no example of anyone who in his life threw it twice on the same land.

46| The third kind, white, they call glisomarga. It is fuller's chalk mixed with rich earth, more fertile for pasture than for crops, so that when the harvest has been taken off, before the second sowing, a most luxuriant crop is cut. While it bears crops, it sends up no other grass. It lasts 30 years. Denser than is right, like Signine cement, it strangles the soil. The dove-coloured the Gauls call by their own name eglecopala. It is raised in clods like stones, and is loosened by sun and frost so that it makes the thinnest flakes.

47| This is equally fertile. They use the sandy if there is no other; in marshy ground even if there is another. We know the Ubii alone of the nations who, farming a most fertile field, enrich it with any earth dug up from below three feet and thrown on in a layer a foot thick. But it does good no longer than 10 years. The Aedui and Pictones have made their fields very rich with lime, which indeed is found very useful for olives and vines. All marga, however, must be thrown on before ploughing.

48| So that the remedy may be seized, it also requires some manure, however little, at first more if rough and not spread out for herbs; otherwise, whatever it be, by its newness it will hurt the soil, which even so is not fertile in the first year. It matters also in what soil it is sought. For the dry kind is better for moist soil, the rich kind for arid. For temperate soil either, chalk or dove-coloured, is suitable.

49| The people beyond the Po so like the use of ash that they put it before dung, and burn the dung of beasts of burden, which is lightest, for this purpose. Yet they do not use both alike in the same field, nor ash in tree-plantations nor for certain crops, as we shall say. There are those who judge that grapes too are fed by dust, and they dust them as they grow ripe and scatter it on the roots of vines and trees. What is certain is that in the province of Narbonensis the circius even ripens the vintages in this way, and dust contributes more there than sun.

50| Of dung there are several differences, and the thing itself is ancient. Already in Homer a royal old man is found enriching his field so with his own hands. King Augeas in Greece is reported to have devised it, but Hercules to have spread it in Italy, which for this discovery granted immortality to its king Stercutus, son of Faunus. Marcus Varro gives first place to the dung of thrushes from the aviaries, which he also magnifies as fodder for oxen and swine and asserts that nothing fattens more quickly on any other food. We may have good hope of our own ways, if among our forefathers there were aviaries so great that fields were manured from them.

51| Columella makes it first from dovecotes, then from poultry-yards, condemning that of swimming birds. The other authorities by consent call upon human fare for this in the first place. Some of these prefer the drinks of men in the workshops of tanners, with hair steeped in them, others the same by itself with water added a second time and even more abundantly than when it is drunk. For there more mischief must be tamed, when a man has come to the rank smell of wine. These are the contests, and in turn men are fed in order to feed the earth too.

52| Next they praise the filth of swine, which Columella alone condemns. Others prefer that of any four-footed animal fed on cytisus, some the dovecote kind. Next then is that of goats, after this of sheep, then of oxen, last of beasts of burden.

53| These were the differences among the ancients, and at the same time I do not find precepts for using it fresh, since here too age is more useful; and it has now been seen among some of the provincials that, with a genial abundance of cattle, dung which has grown old is spread over the ground through sieves like meal, its stench and look changed by the strength of time into a certain charm. (It was lately found that olives rejoice most in ash from lime-kilns.)

54| Varro adds to the precepts that the horse's, since it is lightest, is for feeding cornfields, but for meadows a heavier kind, and that which is made from barley and breeds many herbs. Some even prefer that of oxen to that of beasts of burden, and sheep's to goats', but the ass's to all, since they chew most slowly. On the contrary use pronounces against both. Among all it is agreed that nothing is more useful than a crop of lupine, turned in before it forms pods by the plough or by the mattocks, or cut off in handfuls and buried around the roots of trees and vines. And where there is no cattle, they judge that one may manure with the straw itself or even with fern.

55| Cato: From what you make dung: straw, lupine, chaff, bean-stalks, and the holm-oak and oak foliage. Pull out of the cornfield ebulum, hemlock, and around the willow-beds the tall grass and ulva. Spread that under sheep, and rotten foliage under oxen. If the vineyard is lean, burn its own vine-shoots and plough them in on the spot. And the same: Where you are going to sow grain, put the sheep there.

56| He says also that the earth is fed by certain crops themselves: the cornfield is manured by crops: lupine, bean, vetch; as on the contrary: chickpea, because it is pulled up and because it is salt, barley, fenugreek, bitter vetch, all these scorch the cornfield, and all that are pulled up. Do not put kernels into the cornfield. Virgil thinks the cornfield is scorched also by flax and oats and poppy.

57| They order dung-heaps to be made in the open, in a hollow place that collects moisture, covered with straw so that they do not dry out in the sun, with a stake of oak driven in. So, they say, serpents will not breed in them. To spread dung on the land matters most when the west wind is blowing and the moon is thirsty. Most people misunderstand this as to be done from the rising of the west wind and only in the month of February, when most crops demand it in other months. Whatever time one may choose to do it, care must be taken that it is done with the wind blowing from the equinoctial west and with the moon waning and dry. Fertility and its effects are increased in a wonderful way by such observation.

58| And now that the reasoning about sky and earth has been abundantly set out, we shall speak of those trees which arise by the care and art of men. Their kinds are almost no fewer; so kindly have we repaid the favour of nature. For they come either from seed, or from plants of root, or from layer, or from tearing off, or from a shoot, or from grafting, or from a cut trunk of the tree. For I wonder that Trogus believed that the leaves of palms are sown among the Babylonians and that the tree comes up so. Some, moreover, are sown in several ways, some in all.

59| And most of these nature herself taught, and first of all to sow seed, when it fell and, taken up by the earth, came to life. But some do not come up otherwise, such as chestnuts and walnuts, coppice growth alone excepted; and by seed, though a different one, also those which are sown in other ways, such as vines and apples and pears. For in these the kernel stands in place of seed, not, as in those named above, the fruit itself. And medlars can be born from seed. All these are slow in coming on and degenerate, and must be restored by grafting, and sometimes chestnuts too.

60| In some, on the contrary, it is the nature not to degenerate at all, however they are sown, as in cypresses, palm, laurels. For the laurel too is sown in several ways. We have spoken of its kinds. Of these the Augustan and the bacalis and the tinus are sown in a similar way. In January the berries are gathered, dried by a blast of the north wind, and spread out thinly so that they do not grow hot in a heap. Afterwards some, preparing them for sowing with dung, soak them in urine,

61| others trample them in a basket, in running water, with their feet, until the skin is removed, which otherwise harms through dampness and does not let them sprout. In a furrow dug over again, to the depth of a palm, about twenty in a heap are sown, in the month of March. The same are also grown from layer; the triumphal only from a cutting.

62| All kinds of myrtle in Campania are sown from berries, at Rome from layer. The Tarentine, Democritus teaches, is sown in another way too: the largest of the berries are lightly bruised, so that the grains are not broken, [….] and that this, rubbed in, is smeared round a rope and so sown. The wall will be [….] of density, from which the little rods are spaced out. In this way they sow thorns too for hedges, a rope smeared round with the thorn-mulberries. Balls of laurel, and of myrtle for want of the others, it is time to transplant from the third year.

63| Among those sown from seed, Mago is painstaking about nuts. He orders the almond to be sown in soft clay looking to the south; it likes also hard and warm earth, dies or turns barren in rich or damp; those to be sown should be as sickle-shaped as possible and from a new tree, soaked for three days in diluted dung or the day before they are sown in honeyed water; they are to be fixed point downward, with the edge of the side looking to the north; three are to be sown together, in a triangle, a palm distant from one another; to be watered every ten days until they grow large.

64| Walnuts are sown stretched out, with the joinings lying flat; pine nuts, about seven kernels each, are put into perforated pots or sown like the laurel, which is sown from berries. The citron comes from a grain and from layer; service trees come from seed and from a plant of the root and from tearing off, but the former in warm places, service trees in cold and damp.

65| Nature has also shown the plant-nurseries, in many trees, with offspring sprouting thickly from the roots and the mother bearing what she may kill: for the unordered crowd is pressed under her shade, as in laurels, pomegranates, planes, cherries, plums. In a few of this kind the branches spare their offspring, as in elms and palms. But no such shoots come up except in those whose roots spread near the top of the ground through love of sun and rain.

66| All these it is not the custom to place at once in their own place, but first to give to a nurse and let them grow in nurseries and then move again, which transit wonderfully softens even wild ones, whether the nature of trees too, like that of men, is greedy of novelty and travel, or in leaving they leave their poison behind and become tame by handling, as wild beasts do, while the plant is torn from the root.

67| And she has shown another similar kind, and runners torn from trees have lived, in which kind they are torn off with their own heel and carry with them some part also of the mother's body, with a fringed body. In this way are planted pomegranates, hazels, apples, service trees, medlars, ashes, figs and above all vines. The quince so sown degenerates. From the same it was found out to sow cut-off shoots.

68| This was done first for the sake of hedges, elders, quince and brambles being driven in, soon for cultivation too, as with poplars, alders, willow, which is even sown with the shoot inverted. These are now set out in the places where one wishes them to be. Although it is fitting to speak first of the care of the nursery before passing to other kinds.

69| For to this it matters to choose the soil especially, since it is often agreed that the nurse is more indulgent than the mother. Let it therefore be dry and juicy, worked by the two-pronged mattock, hospitable to incomers and as like as possible to the earth into which they are to be transferred, above all cleared of stones and guarded from the inroads even of the poultry kind, as little cracked as possible, so that the sun does not enter and scorch the fibres.

70| They should be sown with a space of a foot and a half between—for if they touch one another, besides other faults they become wormy as well—it is fitting to hoe more often and to pull out the herbs, and besides to prune the seedlings themselves as they put forth shoots and accustom them to bear the hook.

71| Cato orders hurdles also to be placed on forked stakes, at the height of a man, to take in the sun and to be covered over with straw, which keeps the cold away. So the seedlings of pears and apples are nursed, so pine nuts, so cypresses sown from seed themselves.

72| This consists of the smallest grains, so that some can hardly be made out, a marvel of nature not to be passed over, that trees are born from so small a thing, when the grain of wheat and barley is so much larger, to say nothing of the bean. What likeness to their origin have the seeds of apples and pears? That from these beginnings timber is born which refuses the axe, presses unmastered by immense weights, trees for sails, towers, rams for driving walls! This is the force of nature, this her power. Above all it will be that something is born from a tear, as we shall say in its place.

73| So from the female cypress—for, as we have said, the male bears none—the little balls, gathered in the months I have taught, are dried in the sun, and when broken send out seed wonderfully sought by ants, the marvel being enlarged by the fact that the birth of such great trees is consumed by the food of so tiny an animal. It is sown in the month of April, in a bed levelled with rollers or little wheels, thickly, and earth is sifted over it through sieves to the thickness of a thumb.

74| Against a greater weight it cannot raise itself and is twisted under the earth. For this reason it is also trodden down with the feet. It is watered gently from sunset every third day, so that it drinks evenly, until the seedlings burst through. After a year they are moved apart on a line of three-quarters of a foot, the temperature being kept, so that they are planted in mild weather and without breeze. And wonderful to say, the danger is only on the day when any little rain has dewed, or a wind has blown on them. For the rest they are safe in perpetual security and afterwards hate waters.

75| The zizipha too are sown from a grain in the month of April. The tubures are better grafted on the wild plum and the quince and on the calabrice. That is a wild thorn; whichever receives best also the myxae; and usefully the service trees. To transfer plants from the nursery into another before they are placed in their own place, I think is given as a precept with needless labour, although they promise that the leaves become broader by the transfer.

76| The samara of elms, before they clothe themselves with leaves, must be gathered about the Kalends of March, when it begins to turn yellow. Then, dried for two days in the shade, it is to be sown thickly in ground broken up, with fine earth sifted over it to the thickness used for cypresses. If rain does not help, it must be watered. After a year they are to be moved from the veins of the beds into elm-plots at a foot's interval on every side.

77| It is more useful to sow Atinian elms in autumn, since, lacking seed, they are sown from plants. At five years old they are moved to the tree-plantation near the city, or, as some prefer, when they have begun to be twenty feet. In a trench which is called a nine-footer, 3 feet in depth, of equal breadth, and in addition, around them when placed, earth of three feet is heaped up from the solid on every side. They call this arulae in Campania. The intervals are taken from the nature of the place.

78| In level ground they should be sown more sparsely. Poplars and ashes, because they bud more hastily, should also be set out earlier, that is, from the Ides of February, themselves also born from plants. In setting out trees and tree-plantations and vineyards the quincunx arrangement of rows is the common and necessary one, useful not only for the draught of wind but pleasing to the sight, in whatever way you look, the line stretching out in a row. The method of sowing poplars from seed is the same as for elms, and of transferring them from nurseries and from woods the same.

79| First of all, then, they must be transferred into similar earth or better, and not from warm or early places into cold or late ones, nor from these into those; the pits should be dug beforehand, if it can be done, for so long that they are covered with rich turf.

80| Mago orders a year before, so that they drink in the sun and the rains, or, if the circumstances have not allowed this, that fires be made in the middle two months before, and that they be sown in them only after rains, their depth in clayey or hard ground to be three cubits in every direction, in sloping ground a palm more, and he orders the digging to be chimney-like, narrower at the mouth, but in black earth two cubits and a palm, with square corners of the same measure. The Greek authors agree that they ought to be not deeper than five half-feet nor wider than 2 feet, but nowhere less deep than a foot and a half. Since in damp soil one reaches the neighbourhood of water, Cato, if the place is watery,

81| pits three feet wide at the mouth and a palm and a foot at the bottom, 4 feet in depth, paved with stone or, if there is none, with green willow poles, and if there are not these, with vine-shoots, in such a way that a half-foot of depth is taken off. We think it should be added, from the nature of trees mentioned above, that those which delight in the top of the ground, like the ash and olive, should be let down deeper. These and the like ought to be let down four feet. For the others three feet of depth will suffice. It is harmless to scrape away the parts that have bared themselves. “Cut out that root,” said the commander Papirius Cursor, when he ordered it to be lopped off with the axe to terrify the praetor of the Praenestines.

82| Potsherds, or, some prefer, round stones are to be put underneath, which both hold the moisture and let it through, thinking that flat ones do not do the same and keep the root from the earth. Gravel laid beneath would be between the two opinions.

83| Some prescribe to transfer a tree neither smaller than two years nor larger than three, others when it fills the hand, Cato thicker than 5 digits. The same man would not have omitted, if it mattered, to mark the southern part of the sky on the bark, so that when transferred they might be set in the same and accustomed quarters, lest those of the north, set against the midday suns, should split, and those of the south freeze from the north winds.

84| Which some on the contrary even affect in vine and fig, changing them to the opposite. For they say they become thicker in leaf thus and protect the fruit better and lose less, and the fig so becomes even climbable. Most take care only that the wound of the lopped top looks to the south, ignorant that they are exposing it to splitting by excessive heat.

85| I should rather prefer it to look toward the fifth or the eighth hour of the day. Equally hidden is a thing not to be neglected, that the roots should not dry up by delay, and that trees should not be dug up when a wind is blowing from the north or from that quarter of the sky as far as the winter sunrise, or at least that the roots should not be presented facing these winds, because of which they die without the farmers knowing the cause.

86| Cato condemns all winds and rain too throughout the whole transfer. And besides it will profit that as much earth as possible, in which they have lived, cling to the roots, and that they be bound round entire with the turf, since for that reason Cato orders them to be transferred in baskets, doubtless most usefully. He is indeed content that the top earth be put underneath. Some say that in pomegranates, with a stone laid underneath, the fruit does not burst on the trees. It is better that the roots be set bent; that the tree itself be so placed that it is in the middle of the whole pit is necessary.

87| A fig, if it is sown in squill—this is a kind of bulb—is reported to bear fruit most quickly and not to be liable to worming, a fault from which the other fruits, similarly sown, are free. Great care must be applied to the threads of the roots, so that they appear taken out, not torn up, who can doubt it? On which principle we omit the rest as admitted, such as that the earth about the roots should be packed with a rammer, which Cato judges first in that business, and he prescribes also that the wound be smeared from the trunk with dung and bound over with leaves.

88| Part of this topic relates to intervals: some have ordered pomegranates and myrtles and laurels to be sown more thickly, at nine feet each however, apples a little more, or still more pears and more again almonds and figs. Yet the reasoning from the spread of the branches and of the places will judge best; and from the shade of each tree, since this too must be observed. They are short, however large the trees, when the branches describe a circle, as in apples and pears; the same are enormous in cherries and laurels.

89| Now a certain peculiarity of shades: that of walnuts is heavy and harmful, even to the human head and to all crops near. It kills grasses, and so does the pine, but both resist winds, since they also need protection in the plan of vineyards. Of the drippings those of pine, oak and holm oak are the heaviest, the cypress has none, its shade being least and rolled up on itself. That of figs is light, though spreading, and therefore they are not forbidden to be sown among vines.

90| The shade of elms is mild, and even nourishing, wherever it overshadows. To Atticus this shade too seems among the heaviest, and I do not doubt it, if it is let out into branches; but when it is held in, I do not think its shade harmful. The plane's too is pleasant, although thick. One may trust the grass, which under no other tree more luxuriantly covers its beds. The poplar has none, its leaves playing; the alder's is rich, but feeds the crops. The vine suffices for itself,

91| with a moving leaf and frequent tossing tempering the sun by its shade, the same protecting in a heavy rain. The shade is light of almost all trees whose leaf-stalks are long. This knowledge too is not to be despised nor placed among the last, since for every plant shade is either a nurse or a stepmother. Of walnuts, pines, piceae and fir, whatever they touch is undoubtedly poisoned.

92| The definition of dripping is short: of all trees that are so defended by the projection of their foliage that the rains do not flow through them, the drop is savage. So in this inquiry it will matter most how far the earth in which we are going to sow feeds each tree. Hills by themselves already seek smaller intervals.

93| In windy places it is advantageous to sow them more thickly, the olive however at the greatest interval, about which Cato's Italian opinion is that it be sown at 25 feet, at most 30. But this varies with the nature of the places. No other tree is larger in Baetica, and in Africa—the credit will rest with the authorities—they say that many are called milliary from the weight of oil which they bear in a year's produce. Therefore Mago gave an interval of 75 feet on every side or, in poor, hard and windy soil, at the least, 45.

94| Baetica indeed reaps its richest harvests among olives. It will be agreed that it is a shameful ignorance to thin out grown trees more than is right and hurry them to old age or, as often happens, with the planters themselves proving their own inexperience, to cut them down entirely. Nothing is more disgraceful to farmers than regret for a thing done, so that it is already far better to err in wide spacing.

95| Some, however, grow slowly by nature, and in the first place those born only from seed and lasting for a long age. But those which perish quickly are swift, like the fig, the pomegranate, the plum, the apple, the pear, the myrtle and the willow, and yet they are ahead in wealth. For in the third year they begin to bear, showing even before. Of these the slowest is the pear, the quickest of all the cypirus and the shrub pseudocypirus. For it flowers at once and carries seed. All grow up more quickly when the runners are removed and the nourishment is brought down to one stock.

96| The same nature taught layers also. For brambles, bent by their slenderness and at the same time their excessive length, fix their tips again in the ground and are born once more from themselves, ready to fill everything, unless cultivation resists, so that men might seem born for the earth's sake. So a thing most evil and accursed has yet taught the layer and the living root. The same nature belongs to ivies as well. Cato reports that besides the vine are propagated the fig, olive, pomegranate, all kinds of apples, laurels, plums, myrtle, hazel nuts and Praenestine nuts, the plane.

97| There are two kinds of layers: a branch is pressed down from the tree into a pit of 4 feet in every direction and cut off after two years in the bend, and the plant moved after three years; if one wishes to carry these farther, it is most suitable to bury the layers at once in baskets or earthen pots, so that they are transferred in these.

98| The other kind is more luxurious: by enticing roots on the tree itself, with branches passed through earthen vessels or baskets and stuffed round with earth, and with this blandishment obtained roots among the fruit itself and the topmost tips—for even the topmost tips are sought in this way, with a daring ingenuity of making another tree far from the ground—the layer is cut off after the same two years' space as above and sown with its little baskets. The herb sabina is sown by layer and by tearing off; they say it is wonderfully nourished by wine lees or by brick from walls, pounded. By the same means rosemary is sown, also by a branch, since neither has seed; rhododendron by layer and seed.

99| Nature taught grafting by seed also, when seed has been hastily swallowed by birds in hunger and, whole and moistened by the warmth of the belly, with the fertile aid of dung, is dropped on the soft beds of trees and often carried by winds into some cracks of the bark, whence we have seen a cherry on a willow, a plane on a laurel, a laurel on a cherry and berries of different colours together. They report also that the jackdaw, hiding seeds in the treasuries of caverns, gives causes for the same thing.

100| From this was born inoculation, opening with a pipe like a cobbler's the eye in a tree by cutting out the bark, and enclosing, taken from another, the seed with the same pipe. In figs and apples this was the ancient inoculation. The Virgilian seeks a hollow in a knot at the bud of the bark thrust out and encloses a bud from another tree.

101| Thus far nature herself taught, but grafting chance, another teacher and almost more numerous, in this manner: a careful farmer, surrounding his hut with the protection of a hedge, so that the stakes might not rot, put a threshold of ivy beneath. But they, seized by its living bite, made their own life out of another's, and it appeared that the trunk stood in place of earth. So the surface is removed evenly with a saw, and the trunk smoothed with a pruning knife.

102| The method afterwards was twofold, and the first was grafting between bark and wood. The ancients were afraid to split the trunk; soon they dared to bore into the middle, and themselves pressed into it a shoot to the pith, inserting one, for the pith did not take more. A subtler method afterwards added even six, to match their mortality and number, the trunk being gently split through the middle and a thin wedge keeping the split open until the shoot, cut to a point, descends into the crack.

103| Many things must be observed in this: first of all, what tree can bear such a union, and of what tree. The sap also lies in different places, and not in the same parts in all. In vines and figs the middle is drier and the conception is from the top part; therefore the shoots are sought from there. In olives the sap is around the middle, and from there the shoots too; the tips are thirsty.

104| Most easily they grow together when they have the same nature of bark and flower at the same time, having kinship of the same hour and a partnership of saps. It is a slow matter whenever dry things fight against moist, and hard against the soft of barks. The rest of the observance: that the split not be made at a knot—for an inhospitable hardness rejects the newcomer—but at the brightest part, not much longer than three digits, not slanting, not transparent.

105| Virgil forbids to graft from the tip, and it is established that shoots are to be sought from the shoulders of trees, facing the summer sunrise, and from fruitful ones and from a new bud, unless they are being grafted on an old tree: for these must be stronger. Besides, they must be pregnant, that is, swelling with budding and such as hope to bear in that year, two years old at least and not thinner than the little finger.

106| They are also grafted inverted, when the aim is that a lesser height should spread into breadth. Before all things the budding ones should be shining; nothing anywhere ulcerous or shrivelled favours hope. Let the pith of the shoot be joined to the junction of wood and bark in the mother, for this is better than to equalize the bark outside. The sharpening of the shoot should not bare the pith, yet should uncover it with a thin pipe. Let the taper come down in a light wedge no wider than three digits, which is easiest when it is moistened with water as it is scraped.

107| It must not be sharpened in a wind, nor the bark depart from the wood in either. The shoot is to be pressed down as far as its own bark. Lest it be dislocated while it is pressed, or the bark folded into wrinkles. For this reason weeping shoots ought not to be grafted, no more, by Hercules, than dry ones, because in the one case the bark slips from too much moisture, in the other from lack of life it does not swell nor become one body.

108| They keep this too as a religious observance, that with the moon waxing the shoot be pressed down with both hands. And otherwise in this work two hands together press less, from a necessary moderation. Those let down more strongly bear later and endure more firmly, the opposite in the contrary. Lest the cleft gape too much and take loosely, or take too little and squeeze out, or compress and kill; this is especially to be guarded against in the trunk of an over-strong receiver.

109| So that the middle cleft may be left, some, making with a pruning knife a trace of the split in the trunks, bind the very margin with willow, and afterwards split with a wedge, the band holding in the freedom to gape. (Some grafted in the nursery are moved on the same day.) If a thicker trunk is grafted, it is better to graft between bark and wood, best with a bone wedge, loosened so that the bark does not burst.

110| Cherries are split after the inner bark is removed. These alone are also grafted after midwinter. With the inner bark removed they have a kind of down, which if it seizes the graft, rots it. A band is most usefully drawn tight when the wedge is driven. It is most suitable to graft as near the ground as the reckoning of knots and trunk allows.

111| The shoots ought to project no more than 6 digits in length. Cato mixes with clay or chalk sand and ox dung and orders them kneaded so to a toughness, and this to be placed between and smeared round. From what he has written it is easily apparent that in that age they were accustomed to graft between wood and bark, and in no other way, or to let in shoots beyond a breadth of 2 digits. He prescribes that pears and apples be grafted in spring and 50 days after the solstice and after the vintage,

112| but olives and figs in spring only, with the moon thirsty, [that is, dry], and besides after midday and with no south wind. It is a marvel that, not content with having protected the graft, as has been said, and covered it with turf against rain and cold and with soft bands of twin osiers, he orders it to be covered over besides with oxtongue—that is a kind of herb—and tied on, covered with straw. Now they think it enough abundantly to patch it with straw-mixed mud, the bark standing out 2 digits above the graft.

113| For those grafting in spring the season presses, the buds hastening themselves, except in the olive, whose eyes are very long in bringing forth, and which has least sap under the bark, which in excess harms grafts. But to put off pomegranates and figs and whatever others are dry is by no means useful.

114| The pear may be grafted even in flower, and grafts may be extended also into the month of May. But if the shoots of fruit trees are brought from farther off, they think that fixed in a turnip they best keep their sap, and that they are kept between two roof-tiles beside streams or fish-ponds, stopped up with earth at both ends, but those of vines in dry pits covered with straw and then buried in earth so that the tips stand out.

115| Cato grafts the vine in three ways: he orders it, cut off, to be split through the pith, shoots sharpened as has been said to be added to it, and the piths to be joined. In the second, if vines touch each other, each is shaved on the opposite side slantwise, and they are tied with the piths joined. The third kind is to bore the vine slantwise to the pith and add shoots two feet long, and so, bound and smeared with the kneaded mixture, to cover the graft with earth, the shoots standing upright.

116| Our age corrected it, so that the Gallic auger be used, which hollows and does not burn—since all burning blunts—and that the shoot be chosen when it begins to bud, and project no more than two eyes from the graft, [….] of elm [….] with an osier bound [….] two were put round [….] the edge on two sides, so that from there rather the mucus might drip, which most infests vines; then, when the shoots had grown two feet, the band of the graft was cut, leave being given to fertility by the thickness.

117| For grafting vines they gave a time from the autumn equinox to the beginnings of budding. Cultivated plants are grafted on the roots of wild ones, which are drier by nature; if cultivated ones are grafted on wild ones, they degenerate into wildness. The rest depends on the weather. Dryness is most suitable for grafts; for the remedy for this is that, with earthen vessels set beside, a modest moisture drips down through ash. Inoculation loves gentle dews.

118| Plastering too can be thought to be born of inoculation, and suits especially a thick bark, such as is in figs. So, all the branches having been cut off lest they draw away the sap, in the brightest part of each, where the special gaiety is seen, a little shield is taken out, so that the iron does not go down below the bark, and a bark equal, with the teat of its own bud, is pressed in from another, the joining so closely made that there is no place for a scar and unity comes at once, taking in neither moisture nor breath; nonetheless it is better to protect it with mud and a band.

119| Those who favour new ways would have this kind discovered not long ago, but it is already found among the old Greeks and in Cato, who ordered olive and fig to be grafted in this way, the measure also laid down beforehand in accordance with the rest of his diligence: the barks are to be cut out with a chisel to a length of four digits and a breadth of three, and so fitted together and smeared with their own mixture, on the same principle as in the apple. Some have mixed with this kind the splitting in vines, a little tessera being taken from the bark by driving it in with the flat side.

120| A tree grafted in so many ways we saw near the cascades of Tibur, laden with every kind of fruit, on one branch nuts, on another berries, elsewhere vine, pears, figs, pomegranates and kinds of apples. But its life was short. Nor can we attain everything by experiments in nature. For some cannot be born in any way except of their own accord, and those come up only in wild and deserted places.

121| The plane is held the most capacious of all grafts, afterwards the oak, but both spoil the flavours. Some are grafted in every kind, as the fig, as pomegranates. The vine does not take plastering, nor do those whose bark is thin or falling away or cracked, nor does inoculation take in dry ones or those of little moisture. Inoculation is the most fertile of all, plastering next, but both are very weak; and those that rely on the bark only are uprooted very quickly even by a light breeze. Grafting is the firmest and more fruitful than sowing.

122| The rarity of one example is not to be omitted. Corellius, a Roman knight born at Ateste, grafted a chestnut with a shoot of its own in the country near Naples. So was made the chestnut which took its name from him among the praised. Afterwards Tereus, his freedman, grafted the Corellian again. This is the difference among them: the former is more abundant, the Tereian better.

123| The remaining kinds chance contrived by her own ingenuity, and taught to sow broken-off branches, when stakes driven in took root. Many are so sown, and above all the fig, which is born in all other ways except the cutting, best if a rather large branch is driven deep, sharpened like a stake, a small head left above the ground and that itself covered with sand. The pomegranate too is sown from a branch, the passage first being loosened with stakes, likewise the myrtle, all these 3 feet in length, thinner than an arm, the bark carefully preserved, the trunk sharpened.

124| Myrtle is also sown from cuttings, the mulberry only from a cutting, since religious feeling about lightning forbids grafting it on the elm. Wherefore the sowing of cuttings must now be spoken of. In this it must be observed above all that cuttings be made from fruitful trees, not curved or rough or forked, not thinner than to fill the hand, not shorter than a foot, with the bark untouched, and that the lower cut always be put down, the part that was from the root, and that the budding be heaped over with earth until the plant takes strength.

125| What Cato judged must be guarded in the care of olives we shall best prescribe in his own words: Make the olive cuttings, which you are going to plant in a pit, three feet long, and handle them carefully, that the inner bark may not suffer when you hew or cut. Those you intend to plant in the nursery, make a foot long. Plant them thus: let the place be worked with the two-pronged mattock and well gone over. When you let in the cutting, press the cutting down with the foot. If it descends too little, drive it with a mallet or a rammer, and take care not to split the inner bark when you drive it. Do not make a place first with a stake for the cutting you are letting in; thus it will live better. When cuttings are three years old, then at last they are ripe, when the inner bark turns.

126| If you sow in pits or in furrows, put three cuttings and spread them apart. Let them project above the ground no more than four digits across, or sow the eyes. One ought to take out the olive carefully and carry as many roots as possible with the earth; when you have covered the roots well, tread it down well, so that nothing may harm. If anyone asks what time is for sowing the olive: in dry land at seedtime, in rich land in spring.

127| Begin to prune the olive-yard 15 days before the spring equinox. From that day you will prune rightly for 40 days. Prune it in this way: where the place is rightly fruitful, remove from it everything that is dry and anything the wind has broken. Where the place is not fruitful, cut more, and plough well and trim off knots and make the stumps smooth. Around olives in autumn dig round the roots and add dung. He who mixes the olive-yard most often and deepest will plough out the thinnest roots. If he ploughs badly, the roots will go upward, become thicker, and the strength of the olive will go into the roots.

128| What kinds of olives, and in what kind of earth, he would order them to be sown, and in which direction olive-yards should look, we have said in the account of oil. Mago ordered them sown on a hill and in dry ground and clay between autumn and midwinter, in rich or damp or watered soil from harvest to midwinter. It is understood that he gave this precept for Africa. Italy indeed now sows chiefly in spring. But if one wishes to sow also in autumn, 40 days after the equinox, up to the setting of the Pleiades, there are 3 days only on which it is harmful to sow. It is peculiar to Africa

129| that it grafts them on the wild olive, in a sort of everlastingness, when they grow old, a rod being sent out by the nearest adoption and so another tree growing young from the same, again and as often as is needed, so that the same olive-yards last for ages. The wild olive is grafted with a shoot and by inoculation.

130| An olive is badly planted where an oak has been dug up, since worms, which are called raucae, are born in the root of the oak and pass over. It has been found more useful not to smoke the cuttings or dry them before they are sown. An old olive-yard has been found better scraped between the spring equinox and the rising of the Pleiades in alternate years, likewise the moss scraped off, and dug round every year from the solstice in a trench of 2 cubits, a foot in depth, and manured in the third year.

131| Mago orders almonds likewise to be sown from the setting of Arcturus to midwinter, pears not all at the same time, because they do not flower at the same time, oblong or round ones from the setting of the Pleiades to midwinter, the other kinds in mid-winter from the setting of the Arrow, looking toward the east wind or the north, laurel from the setting of the Eagle to the setting of the Arrow. For the reasoning about the time of sowing and grafting is connected.

132| They have decided that this is done for the most part in spring and autumn. There is also another hour, about the rising of the Dog Star, known to few, since it is understood not to be equally useful in all places, but it is not to be omitted by us, who are inquiring not into the reasoning of any one region, but of the whole of nature.

133| In the region of Cyrene they sow under the blast of the etesian winds, and in Greece also, the olive especially in Laconia. The island of Cos sows even vines then; the rest among the Greeks do not hesitate to inoculate and to graft, but do not sow trees. And the nature of places has very great power in this; for in Egypt they sow in every month, and wherever the rains are in summer, as in India and Ethiopia, trees are necessarily sown after these in autumn.

134| So the times of budding are three, the same: spring and the rising of the Dog Star and of Arcturus. For not only in animals is there eagerness for mating, but much greater is the desire of the earth and of all things sown, which it matters most to use at the right time, a peculiarity especially in grafts, since there is a mutual desire on both sides of coming together.

135| Those who approve spring admit it straight from the equinox, declaring that the buds are in travail, and therefore the embraces of the barks are easy. Those who prefer autumn, from the rising of Arcturus, because they at once take a sort of root and come prepared for spring, and the budding does not carry off the strength at once. Some, however, have a fixed time of year everywhere, as cherries and almonds, to be sown or grafted about midwinter. The situation of places will judge best for most. For cold and watery places ought to be planted in spring, dry and warm in autumn.

136| The general rule of Italy distributes the times in this manner: for the mulberry from the Ides of February to the equinox, for the pear autumn, so that they precede midwinter by 15 days, not less, for summer apples and quinces, likewise service trees and plums, after mid-winter up to the Ides of February, for the Greek carob and peaches before midwinter through autumn, for nuts, walnut and pine and hazel and Greek and chestnut, from the Kalends of March to the same Ides, for willow and broom about the Kalends of March; this, we have said, is sown from seed in dry places, that from a rod in damp.

137| There is yet a new method of grafting, that I may not knowingly pass over anything I have found anywhere, devised by Columella, as he himself affirms, by which even diverse and unsociable natures of trees are coupled, such as fig and olive. Beside this he orders the fig to be sown at no greater interval than that it can be touched freely by a branch of the olive as pliant and obedient as possible, and that it be tamed meanwhile at all times by the practice of bending.

138| Afterwards, when the fig has gained strength, which happens at three years or at any rate five, the upper part being cut off, the pruned branch itself, with its tip scraped off, as has been said, is fixed in the leg of the fig, kept by bands lest the curvature escape. So by a kind of tempering of layers and grafts, in three years there grows together a common one between the two mothers, and in the fourth year, cut off, the whole belongs to the adopter, a method not yet commonly known, or at least not sufficiently ascertained by me.

139| For the rest, the same reasoning stated above about hot and cold, damp and dry places has also shown how to dig pits. In watery places it will be expedient to make them neither wide nor deep, otherwise in hot and dry places, so that they may receive water as much as possible and hold it. This is the method of tending old trees too. For in burning places they heap up the roots in summer and cover them, so that the heat of the sun may not scorch them.

140| Elsewhere they bare the roots and let in the draught. The same people in winter defend them from frost with heaps. Those others, on the contrary, open them in winter and seek moisture for the thirsty. Wherever the method of digging round [the trees] is used, the circuit [round them] is three feet in a ring, and not that in meadows, since through love of sun and moisture they wander in the top of the earth. And concerning trees to be sown and grafted for the sake of fruit let this much be said in general:

141| There remains the account of those that are sown for the sake of others, and of vineyards above all, as coppice wood. The first place among these is held by willows, which they sow in a damp place, dug over again to 2 and a half feet, with a cutting a foot and a half long or a pole, which is more useful the fuller it is.

142| They ought to be at an interval of six feet each. At three years old they are restrained by pruning at two feet from the ground, so that they spread in breadth and can be trimmed without ladders. For the willow is more fruitful the nearer to the ground. These too they order to be dug round every year in the month of April.

143| This is the cultivation of osier-willows. The pole-willow is sown as both rod and cutting, the digging the same. It is right to cut poles from it in about the fourth year. And these repair the place of the ageing by a layer cut off after a year. A single iugerum of osier-willow will suffice for 25 iugera of vineyard. For the same purpose the white poplar is sown in ground dug two feet deep, with a cutting a foot and a half long, dried for two days, at an interval of a foot and a palm, earth thrown over it to a thickness of 2 cubits.

144| The reed delights in soil even more watery than these. It is sown from the bulb of the root, which some call the eye, in a pit three-quarters of a foot deep, at an interval of 2 and a half feet, and is renewed from itself when the old reed-bed is rooted up, which has been found more useful than trimming, as was done before. For the roots creep among one another and are killed by the mutual running over.

145| The time for sowing is before the eyes of the reeds swell, before the Kalends of March. It grows up to midwinter and stops when it begins to harden. This is the sign that it has the season for cutting. And this they think must be dug round, as often as the vineyard. It is also sown crosswise, not buried deep in the earth, and from each eye as many plants burst out.

146| It is also sown as a detached plant in a furrow a foot deep, two buds being buried so that the third knot touches the earth, the tip sloping, that it may not catch dew. It is cut with the moon waning. For vineyards one year dried is more useful than green.

147| The chestnut is preferred to all stakes for ease of handling and stubborn durability; in regrowth it is more luxuriant for coppicing even than the willow. It seeks an easy soil, yet not sandy, and especially damp sand or carbunculus or even the meal of tufa, in any situation however shaded, northern and very cold, or even sloping. It refuses gravel, red ochre, chalk, and all fertility of earth.

148| We have said that it is sown from a nut, but it does not come up unless from the largest, nor unless sown five together in a heap. The ground must be broken up beneath from the month of November to February, when they fall loosed of their own accord from the tree and spring up beneath. The intervals should be a foot, with a furrow three-quarters of a foot deep all round. From this nursery they are moved after two years into another at a two-foot interval.

149| There are layers also, none indeed easier. For the root being bared, the whole is laid in a furrow; it is born again from the top left above the ground, and another from the root. But once moved it does not know how to be a guest, and fears novelty for about two years; afterwards it leaps forward. Therefore coppice plantations are filled with nuts rather than with living roots.

150| The cultivation is no other than those mentioned above, by digging and pruning for the two years following. For the rest it tends itself, its shade killing superfluous runners. It is cut within the seventh year. Stakes of one iugerum suffice for twenty iugera of vineyard, since they are made also from a forked stock, and last beyond the second cutting of its wood.

151| The aesculus comes up in the same way, the cutting three years later, less slow to be born in whatever earth it is sown in spring from an acorn, but only of the aesculus, in a pit three-quarters of a foot deep, at intervals of 2 feet. It is hoed lightly four times a year. This stake rots least and when cut sprouts most. Besides those we have mentioned, the ash, laurel, peach, hazel, apple are coppice trees, but they are born more slowly and scarcely bear the earth, driven in as stakes, let alone moisture. The elder, on the contrary, makes the firmest stake, sown from cuttings, like the poplar. For of the cypress we have said enough.

152| And, the supports of vineyards being so provided, there remains for us to give with special care the nature of the vines themselves. In the shoots of vines and of certain trees whose nature within is spongier, the jointed knots of the stalks shut off the pith by partitions. The ferulae themselves are short, and toward the top the joints are shorter, enclosing their internodes on either side.

153| The pith, whether it is the vital breath, stretches before itself, filling the length, as long as the knots lie open as a channel. But when, grown solid, they have taken away the passage, it breaks out, driven back, from the lower part of itself near the previous knot, always at alternate sides of the groin, as has been said in the reed and the ferula, of which the right is understood from the lowest joint, the left in the next, and so by turns. This in the vine is called the bud, when it has made a tuft there; but before it makes it, there is an eye in the hollow and the germ at the very tip. So are born shoots, grandshoots, grapes, leaves, tendrils, and it is wonderful that those born on the right side are stronger.

154| These, then, in the case of cuttings, must be cut through at the middle of the knots when they are planted, in such a way that the pith does not flow out. And in the fig, cuttings three-quarters of a foot long are planted after the ground has been opened with dibbles, in such a way that the parts nearest the tree go down and 2 eyes stand out above the ground. The eyes, in the cuttings of trees, are properly what we call the points from which shoots sprout.

155| For this reason in nurseries too the trees sometimes bear in the same year in which they would have borne fruit on the tree itself, when, planted in good season, they bring forth elsewhere the conceptions begun while they were still gravid. Figs planted in this way are easily transplanted in the third year. This has been granted to this tree in return for its quickness in ageing: that it should come on very fast.

156| The planting of vines is more varied. First of all, nothing is planted of these but what is useless and has been pruned off as sarmenta. Whatever has borne fruit in the last season is pruned off. It used to be the custom to plant a cutting with a head on either side, taken from the hard wood, and for that reason it is still called a malleolus. Afterwards it began to be torn off with its heel, as in the fig, and nothing is longer-lived. A third kind has been added, still quicker, without the heel, which are called sagittae when they are twisted before being driven in; the same, when cut off and not twisted, are called trigemmes. More are made from the same cutting in this way.

157| To plant from the pampinaria is barren, and one ought to plant only from the fruitful wood. A shoot that has few knots is judged unfruitful; closeness of buds is the sign of fertility. Some forbid planting any shoots except those that have flowered. To plant sagittae is less useful, since what has been twisted is easily broken in transplanting. They are planted a foot long, not shorter, with five or six knots. Fewer than three buds cannot be found in this measure.

158| It is most useful to plant on the same day on which they are cut off; if it is necessary to plant much later those that have been kept, as we have directed, care should be taken above all that they do not dry out in the sun when laid outside the ground, or become dulled by wind or cold. Those that have been longer in the dry, before they are planted, should be revived in water for several days.

159| A sunny soil, and as wide as possible, in the nursery or in the vineyard, ought to be trenched with a two-pronged mattock, three feet deep with the double spade, and the earth thrown back with the hoe at the rate of four feet of fermentum, so that the trench advances by two feet at a time; the dug ground should be cleaned and levelled, so that nothing is left raw, but the whole is brought to measure. Uneven ridges betray poor trenching. The part also that lies between, the pulvinus, must be measured.

160| Cuttings are planted both in a pit and in a longer furrow; the earth thrown over them should be as fine as possible, but in a thin soil to no purpose unless a richer layer is spread beneath [….] than two ought to be covered and the nearest touched, and the earth pressed down and packed with the same stake; in the nursery there should be a space of a foot and a half between pairs of plants in breadth, half a foot in length; the malleoli so planted are cut back in the 24th month to the lowest joint, unless the plant itself is to be spared. From this a growth of eyes shoots out, with which in the 36th month it is transplanted as a rooted plant.

161| There is also a luxurious method of planting vines, in which four malleoli are tied together at the lower end [luxuriously] with a strong binding, and so are passed either through the bones of an ox's leg or through earthenware necks and buried with two buds left standing out. In this way they are united, and when cut back they put out a shoot. Afterwards the pipe is broken and the root takes up its strength freely, and the grape bears the berries of all its bodies.

162| In another kind, newly devised, the malleolus is split, and the pith scraped out, and the stems themselves are drawn together into one, so that the buds are spared in every way. Then the malleolus is planted in earth mixed with dung, and when it begins to spread its stems, it is cut back and dug round rather often. Columella promises that the berries of such a grape will have nothing of wood inside, though it is very wonderful that the plants themselves live when the pith has been taken from them.

163| It seems not to be omitted that trees are also born from cuttings which have no joint. For box trees come up when five or six of the very thinnest sprigs are bound together and driven in. At one time it was a matter of observance that they should be broken off from unpruned box, since otherwise they were not believed to live. Experiments have taken this away.

164| After the care of the nursery comes the system of vineyards. These are of five kinds: with the shoots spread over the ground; or with the vine standing upright by itself; or with a prop but without a yoke; or trained on feet with a single yoke; or conpluviate with a fourfold yoke.

165| What the system of the pedata is, the same will be understood for that also in which the vine will stand by itself without a prop. For this is not done except for lack of stakes. The single yoke consists of a row laid lengthwise, which they call a canterium. This is the better for wine, because it does not shade itself, and is ripened by constant sun, and feels the breeze more, and sheds its dew more quickly, and is easier for stripping of leaves and for harrowing and every work. Above all else it comes out of flower to better advantage.

166| The yoke is made of a pole or reed or hair or cord, as in Spain and at Brundisium. The conpluviate vine is more abundant in wine, and is named from the hollows of houses, the compluvia. It is divided into four parts with as many yokes. The method of planting it will be told, and will hold good for every kind, though in this one it is merely more varied. It is planted in 3 ways: best in trenched ground, next in a furrow, last in a pit.

167| Of trenching I have spoken; for a furrow the breadth of a spade is enough, for pits three feet in each direction. The depth in any kind is three feet, and therefore a vine ought not to be transplanted that is shorter than this, since it must still stand out above the ground by two buds.

168| It is necessary that the earth be softened with fine furrows at the bottom of the pit and mixed with dung. Sloping ground calls for deeper pits, and besides this for rims raised into a cushion on the side of the slope. Those of them that are made longer, so as to receive two vines from opposite directions, will be called alvei. The root of the vine ought to be in the middle of the pit, but the vine itself, resting on solid ground, ought to face the equinoctial east, and to take its first props from a reed;

169| vineyards are to be laid out with a decumanus 18 feet wide, for the passing of vehicles in opposite directions, and are to be divided by other cross paths of ten feet each through the middle of the iugera or, if the extent is greater, laid out with a cardo of as many feet as the decumanus, and always to be furnished with quintani as footpaths, that is, so that at every fifth post single plots are enclosed by a yoke; in close soil nothing is planted unless the ground is trenched again, and nothing but the rooted plant, while in tender and loose soil the malleolus may be planted either in a furrow or in a pit.

170| On hills to run furrows across the slope is better than trenching, so that the washings may be held by their crossbars; in rainy weather or on dry soil malleoli are to be planted in autumn, unless the character of the district changes this. For a dry and hot district will demand autumn, a damp and cold one even the end of spring. In arid soil even the rooted plant is planted in vain, and the malleolus badly in dry ground, except after rain, but in watered ground even the leafy vine may be rightly planted, and right up to the solstice, as in Spain. It is most useful for the winds to be still on the day of planting. Most people wish for southerly winds; Cato rejects them.

171| Between two vines there ought to be a space, by a middle reckoning, of five feet each, at the least four feet in rich soil, in thin soil eight at the most; the Umbrians and Marsians leave gaps of up to twenty feet for the sake of ploughing in those plantations which they call porculeta; in a rainy and misty district they are set more thinly, in a dry one more thickly.

172| Careful thrift has found savings, in that when a vineyard is planted in trenched ground, a nursery is made on the way, so that the rooted plant is planted in its own place, and the malleolus that is to be transplanted is planted between the vines and the rows, a method which yields about 16,000 rooted plants to the iugerum. There is, however, a difference of two years of fruit, by which a plant grows more slowly when planted in place than when transplanted.

173| A rooted plant set in a vineyard is cut back after a year to the ground, so that only one eye stands out, with a prop fixed beside it and dung added. In like manner in the second year too it is cut back, and takes strength and feeds within itself what will be equal to the burden. Otherwise, in its haste to bear, slender and thin as a rush, unless it is held back by such chastening, it goes wholly into fruit. Nothing is born more greedy, and unless its strength is kept for bearing, it becomes wholly fruit.

174| The best stakes are those we have spoken of, either of ridica in oak and olive wood, or, if these are lacking, posts of juniper, cypress, laburnum, elder. Stakes of the remaining kinds are cut again every year. Most wholesome on the yoke is reed bound in bundles, which lasts five years. When shorter shoots are joined to one another by a sarmentum in the manner of ropes, the arcs made from this are called funeta.

175| In the third year of the vineyard the vine sends out a quick, strong shoot, and one which age will make a vine. This leaps up on to the yoke. Some then blind it by taking off the eyes with an upturned sickle, to draw it out further, a harmful injury. For it is more useful to establish the habit of bearing, and better to strip away the leaves from the vine once it is joined to the yoke until one is pleased that it is strengthened.

176| There are those who forbid it to be touched in the year next after it was transplanted, and not to be tended with the sickle before the 60th month, and then to be cut back to 3 buds. Others even cut back in the very next year, but so as to add three or four joints each year, and bring it to the yoke only in the fourth. This is slow in fruit on both sides, and moreover withered and knotty, with the growth of dwarfs. It is best that the mother be strong, and afterwards the offspring bold. Nor is that safe which is scarred, a great error of inexperience;

177| whatever is of that sort is born of wounds, not of the mother. Let her have all her strength while she is being strengthened, and she will receive the whole year's fruit when she has been allowed to bear. Nature brings nothing forth in portions. The vine that has grown out sufficiently firm ought to be placed at once on the yoke; if she is still rather weak, she is to be cut back and lodged just beneath the yoke itself.

178| It is decided by strength, not by age. It is rash to command a vine before it has the thickness of a thumb. In the following year the shoots will be brought out, one or two according to the strength of the mother. The same may be nourished also in the year after, if weakness compels, and in the third year at last 2 may be added. Nor are more than four ever to be allowed, and in short fruitfulness is never to be indulged and always to be held in check. Its nature is such that it prefers to bear than to live. Whatever is taken from the wood is added to the fruit. The vine would rather seed be produced than fruit, since fruit is a perishable thing. So it runs riot to its own ruin, and does not enlarge itself, but empties itself out.

179| The nature of the soil too will give counsel. In a lean soil, even if the vine has strength, let it be cut back and kept within the yoke, so that all its bearing may come out under it. That interval ought to be the least, so that it reaches the yoke and hopes for it, but does not hold it, so far from lying back upon it or spreading itself delicately. Let this measure be so tempered that it prefers still to grow rather than to bear.

180| The shoot ought to have two or three buds under the yoke, from which the wood may be born; then it is plunged along the yoke and tied, so that it is held up by the yoke and does not hang, and presently is tied more tightly from the third bud by a binding, since in this way too the rush of the wood is checked and the leaves on this side leap up more thickly. They forbid the tip to be tied back. This is the nature of the thing: the part that is bent down or tied before gives fruit, and most of all the curve itself. What is on this side sends out wood, since the breath of air, I believe, is in the way, and also that pith we have spoken of. The wood which has thus sprung forth will give fruit in the following year.

181| So there are two kinds of shoots: one that comes out of the hard wood and promises wood for the next year is called pampinarium, or, where it is above the scar, fructuarium; the other, from a shoot of one year, is always fructuarium. There is left under the yoke also what is called the custos, the guardian; this is a young shoot, not longer than three buds, which is to give wood the next year, if the vine has spent itself in luxuriance, and another beside it, of the size of a wart, which is called the furunculus, in case the custos should fail.

182| A vine, before it completes its seventh year from the cutting, if it is called out to fruit, grows thin as a rush and dies. Nor is it approved to let an old shoot be sent out at length as far as the fourth prop, which some call dracones, others funiculi, to make what they call masculeta. When the vine has hardened, it is worst to lead it across in the vineyard.

183| In the fifth year the shoots themselves are twisted, and single wood is sent out for single shoots, and then for the next, and the earlier ones are cut off. It is always better to leave a guardian, but this ought to be nearest the vine, and not longer than has been said, and, if the shoots run to luxuriance, they are twisted, so that the vine sends out 4 woods, or 2, if the vineyard is of a single yoke.

184| If a vine is to be ordered by itself without a stake, it will at first require some prop or other, until it learns to stand and to rise upright; the rest is the same from the beginning, but the thumb-lengths are to be divided by pruning in equal balance on every side, so that the fruit does not weigh down on any one part. In passing, the same pressing down will keep it from shooting up on high. For this vineyard any height above three feet totters; for the others the height begins from the fifth foot, provided it does not exceed a man's proper stature.

185| Even for those that are spread on the ground, they put round small cages to mark them out, with pits made around the edge, lest the straying shoots fight with one another as they meet, and the greater part of the earth gathers its vintage so, lying on the ground, since in Africa and in Egypt and Syria and the whole of Asia and in many places of Europe this custom prevails.

186| There, then, the vine must be held down close against the ground, nourished at the root in the same manner and time as in the yoked vineyard, so that always only thumb-lengths are left, in fertile soil with three buds, in thinner with two, and it is better to have many than long ones. What we have said of the nature of the soil will be felt the more strongly the nearer the grape is to the earth.

187| It is most useful for the kinds to be kept apart and for each district to be planted with its own kinds; for a mixture of kinds is discordant even in wine, not only in must; or, if they are mixed, it is necessary to join none but those which ripen together. Yokes should be higher the richer the field and the more level, likewise in a dewy, misty and less windy place; on the contrary lower in a thin, dry, hot soil exposed to winds. The yokes ought to be tied to the stake with the tightest possible knot, the vine held by a light one. Which kinds of vines, and in what soil and sky, ought to be planted, we have taught when we enumerated their natures and those of the wines.

188| About the rest of the cultivation there is violent dispute. Most order the vineyard to be dug over through the whole summer after each dew; others forbid it while the vine is budding, for the eyes are shaken off and rubbed away by the passage of those who enter, and for this reason all cattle ought to be kept far off, but most of all the woolly kind, since they most easily carry off the buds. Rakes also are hostile when the grape is coming to maturity, and it is enough for the vineyard to be dug over three times a year: from the spring equinox to the rising of the Vergiliae, and when the Dog Star rises, and when the berry is turning dark.

189| Some fix it thus: an old vineyard once, after the vintage before the winter solstice, while others think it enough to bare the roots and manure, a second time from the Ides of April, before it conceives, that is, on the 6th day before the Ides of May; then before it begins to flower, and when it has finished flowering, and when the grape is changing colour. The more experienced affirm that if it is dug over oftener than is right, the berries become so tender that they burst. Things that are to be dug should be dug before the hot hours of the day, just as one should neither plough nor dig mud, and the dust raised by digging is of use against the sun and the mists.

190| The spring stripping of leaves is agreed to be from the Ides of May, within 10 days, at any rate before it begins to flower, and it ought to be done below the yoke. About the next stripping opinions differ. Some think the vine should be stripped when it has finished flowering, others just at ripeness. But on these the precepts of Cato will decide. For the method of pruning also has to be handed on.

191| They set about this straight after the vintage, where the warmth of the sky allows. But in this too it ought never to be done, on the reckoning of nature, before the rising of the Aquila, as we shall teach in the causes of the stars in the next volume, nay rather not before the west wind, since the fault of over-hasty haste is doubtful. If some relapse of winter should bite the vines while they are wounded by the fresh treatment, it is certain that their buds are dulled by the cold and the wounds split, and that the eyes are burnt by the fault of the sky as the tear trickles down. For frost

192| who does not know they become brittle? That reckoning belongs to the labourers on great estates, not to nature's lawful haste. The earlier they are pruned, on suitable days, the more wood they pour out; the later, the richer the fruit. Therefore it will be fitting to prune lean vines first, strong ones last, to make every cut slanting, so that rain may easily run off, and turned toward the ground with as slight a scar as possible, the edge of the knife sharpened and the wound smoothed; and the cutting back is always to be between 2 buds, so that there is no wound to the eyes in the part cut off.

193| They judge that part to be black, and that it must be cut back until sound wood is reached, since useful wood does not come out of what is diseased. If a lean vine has no suitable shoots, it is most useful to cut it back to the ground and draw out new ones; in stripping the leaves not to take off those leaves that go with a grape, for that undermines the grapes too, except in a young vineyard. Those born on the side, not from an eye, are judged useless, since even the grape that is born from the hard wood stiffens, so that it cannot be removed except with iron.

194| Some think it more useful for a stake to be set between 2 vines, and they are thus more easily bared at the root, and it is better for a vineyard of a single yoke, provided the yoke itself has strength and the district is not hostile with blasts. In the fourfold vineyard the prop ought to be as near as possible to the load, yet, so that the baring of the roots does not feel it as a hindrance, not more than a cubit away; they direct the roots to be bared before pruning.

195| Cato lays down the following precepts on the whole cultivation of vines: Make the vineyard as high as possible and tie it properly, provided you do not bind it too tightly. Tend it in this way: bare the heads of the vines at sowing time. Dig round the vineyard when pruned, begin to plough, draw continuous furrows to and fro. Layer the tender vines as soon as possible, and harrow in this way: prune the old ones as little as possible; rather, if need be, throw them down and cut them off two years after. It will be time to cut back a young vine when it is strong.

196| If the vineyard has been made bald of vine, put furrows in between and plant there a living root. Remove shade from the furrows, and dig often. In an old vineyard, if it is lean, sow ocinum—do not sow any that bears grain—and put dung, chaff, grape-husks, something of these, round the heads.

197| When the vineyard begins to put out leaves, strip them. Tie young vineyards often, so that the stem is not broken; and for the one that is already going on to a pole, tie its tender leaves lightly and stretch them out, so that they stand properly. When the grape begins to turn colour,

198| tie up the vines [….]. A vine is grafted in one way in spring, in another when the grape is in flower; the latter is best.—If you wish to move an old vineyard to another place, you may do so, provided it is no thicker than an arm. First prune it; leave not more than two buds. Dig it well out from the roots, and take care not to wound the roots. Place it as it is in a pit or in a furrow and cover it and tread it well down, and in the same way set up the vineyard, tie it and bend it as it was, and dig often.—The ocinum which he orders to be sown in the vineyard, the ancients called a fodder that endures shade, which comes up very fast.

199| There follows the system of the arbustum, wonderfully condemned by Saserna father and son, celebrated by Scrofa, the oldest and most expert after Cato, and not even by Scrofa conceded except to Italy, though it is judged, over so long a time, that noble wines are born only in arbusta and in these too the higher are the more praised, as the lower are the more abundant. So much is gained by height.

200| On this principle the trees also are chosen. First of all the elm, excepting the Atinian for its excessive foliage. Then the black poplar, for the same reason, being less dense in leaf. Most do not scorn the ash and the fig, and even the olive, if it is not shady in its branches. The planting and care of these have been fully treated. Before the 36th month they are forbidden to be touched with the knife. The arms are kept alternately, pruned in alternate years, and in the sixth year they are married to the vine.

201| Transpadane Italy, besides the trees mentioned above, furnishes its fields with arbusta of cornel, opulus, lime, maple, ornus, hornbeam, oak, and Venetia with willow because of the wetness of the soil. And the elm, cut off in the middle, is arranged in three benches of branches, hardly any tree being higher than 20 feet. Their storeys spread out from the eighth foot of height on hills and dry fields, from the twelfth in plains and damp places.

202| The palms ought to face the midday sun, the branches to be trained up from the projection in the manner of fingers, with the fine growth of even thin twigs trimmed on them, so that they do not cast shade. The right interval of trees, if the ground is ploughed, is forty feet back and front, twenty on the sides; if it is not ploughed, the same in all directions. Often they nourish ten vines to each tree, the farmer being blamed who has fewer than three.

203| To marry any but strong trees is harmful, since the vines' quick growth kills them. It is necessary to plant in a pit three feet deep, the vines standing a foot apart from one another and from the tree. There is no malleolus there and no trenching, no expense of digging, inasmuch as the system of the arbustum excels by this peculiar endowment, that crops borne from the same ground are good for the vines as well, and the height, asserting itself, is not compelled, as in a vineyard, to be fenced against injuries from animals by a wall or a hedge or at the very least at the expense of ditches.

204| In the arbustum, of the aforesaid methods there is only that of rooted plants, and likewise of layers, and this is twofold, as we have said: that by baskets from the storey itself, which is most approved because it is safest from cattle; the other, with the vine or shoot bent down beside its own tree or round the nearest unmarried one. What is above ground of the mother is ordered to be scraped, that it may not sprout. In the earth not fewer than 4 buds are buried to take root, and outside two are left at the head.

205| The vine in an arbustum stands [entire] in a furrow 4 feet long, three wide, and two and a half deep. A year later the layer is cut through to the pith, so that it may gradually grow used to its own roots; the stem is cut back from the head to two buds; in the third year the whole mergus is cut off and sought again deeper in the earth, that it may not put out leaves from the cut. The rooted plant ought to be taken up straight after the vintage.

206| Recently it was found to plant the draco beside the tree; so we call a shoot that has served its time and hardened over several years. This, cut off at as great a size as possible, with the bark scraped from three parts of its length, as far as it is to be buried—whence they also call it rasilis—, is pressed down in a furrow, the remaining part being set upright against the tree; it is very quick in a vine. If the vine or the soil be thin, it is usual to cut it down as near the ground as possible until the root is firm, just as it is not to be planted when dewy or in a blast of the north wind. The vines themselves ought to look to the north, but their shoots to the south.

207| There is no hurry to prune the young vine, but first the wood is to be gathered into circles, and pruning applied only to a strong one; a vine on an arbustum generally comes to fruit a year later than one on a yoke. There are some who forbid pruning at all before it has equalled the tree in length. At the first cut let it be cut back 6 feet from the ground, a whip being left below and forced to grow by the bending of the wood. When it has been pruned, let 3 buds remain on it, not more.

208| Of these, the shoots let go are in the next year to be spread out on the lowest benches and year by year to climb to the higher ones, a hardwood being always left on each storey and one outlet, which climbs up as far as is pleasing. For the rest, in pruning, all the whips that have just borne are cut back, and new ones are scattered over the storeys, the tendrils cut round on every side. The native pruning, with the locks of the vines thrown down over the branches, clothes the tree, and the locks themselves with grapes; the Gallic is extended on traduces; that of the Aemilian Way on ridicae round the circuit of the Atinian elms, avoiding their foliage.

209| There is the inexperience of some in hanging a vine beneath a branch with a binding, a suffocating injury. It ought to be held by a withy, not squeezed; nay more, those who have willows to spare prefer to do it with this softer binding, and the Sicilians with the grass they call ampelodesmos, and all Greece with rush, cyperus and ulva. Even when freed from the binding, for some days it should wander and spread unarranged and lie back on the ground, which it has looked on throughout the whole year;

210| for as beasts of burden are helped by rolling after the yoke, and dogs after running, so then also the loins of vines are helped by being stretched out. The tree too itself rejoices, relieved from constant burden, like one drawing breath, and there is nothing in the work of nature that does not want some turns of holiday after the example of days and nights. For this reason pruning straight after the vintage is disapproved, while the vines are still tired from bearing fruit. When pruned, let them again be tied in another place, for they feel the track of the binding with undoubted distress.

211| The traduces of the Gallic cultivation, two on each side from the flanks, if the trees stand at an equal distance of forty feet, four, if at twenty, are mingled with one another coming to meet, and tied together made one, stiffened on the way by the company of twigs, where they fail, or, if their shortness does not allow it, stretched out with a hook tied on to the widowed tree. They used to cut off a traduces two years old—for it is burdened by age—; it is better to give time, that they may make a rasilis if the thickness permits. In other cases it is useful that the bolsters of the future draco be fed.

212| There is still one kind, midway between this and the layer, of burying whole vines in the ground and splitting them with wedges and propagating into several furrows at once from one, the slenderness of the single plants being strengthened by shafts bound round and by leaves not cut off, which run out from the sides. The Novarian farmer, not content with a crowd of traduces or with a supply of branches, puts forks besides and winds the shoots round them; and so, besides the faults of the soil, the wines too become harsh through the cultivation.

213| Another fault is near the City among the people of Aricia, whose vines are pruned in alternate years, not because that profits the vine, but because, through cheapness, the expenses exceed the return. The Carsulan people follow a middle course, pruning only the decayed parts of the vines and those beginning to dry up, and leaving the rest to the grape. When the superfluous load is taken away, the fewness of the wounds serves in place of all nourishment; but unless in a rich soil such cultivation degenerates into the wild vine.

214| Arbusta need to be ploughed as deep as possible, although the care of grain does not demand it. It is not the custom to strip their leaves; and this is a saving of labour. They are pruned along with the vine, the density of branches being thinned, those which are superfluous and consume nourishment. We have forbidden the cuts to face north or south; better if neither towards sunset. Such ulcers too hurt long and heal with difficulty, from too much cold or heat. There is not the same freedom as in the vine, since the sides are fixed, but it is easier to hide the wounds and turn them aside where you wish. In the trimming of trees on the upturned side, cups as it were are to be made, so that moisture does not stand.

215| Props are to be added to the vine, which it may climb by taking hold of them, if they are of the larger sort. The pergulas of noble vines, they hand down, should be pruned at the Quinquatrus, and those whose grapes one wishes to keep, at the waning of the moon; and those pruned at the new moon, they say, are exposed to no animals. On another reasoning, they hold that vines are to be trimmed by night at the full moon, when it is in Leo, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Taurus, and that in general planting should be done at the full or at any rate the waxing moon. In Italy ten cultivators suffice for each hundred iugera of vineyards.

216| And now that the planting and care of trees have been fully treated, since we have spoken amply of palms and cytisus among foreign trees, the rest of their nature must be shown, so that nothing may be wanting, a matter of great concern for all these. For trees too are attacked by diseases. What indeed that is born is free of these evils? Wild trees, they say, have no deadly diseases, and are troubled only by hail in budding or in flower, and are also scorched by heat or a rather cold blast on an untimely day, for in their own season frosts even do good, as we have said.

217| What then? Do not vines also perish with cold? This is indeed the means by which a fault of the soil is detected, since it does not happen except in a cold one. And so by winters we test the hardness of the sky, not of the soil. Nor are the weakest trees endangered by frost, but the greatest, and when they are thus troubled their topmost shoots dry up, since the moisture, checked, could not reach there.

218| Some diseases of trees are common, some peculiar to kinds. Common are worm-eating and sideratio and pain of the limbs, whence weakness of the parts, with even a sharing of names with the miseries of man. We certainly say mutilated bodies, and eyes of buds burnt up, and much of a like lot.

219| And so they suffer both hunger and indigestion, which come from the quantity of moisture, and some even from obesity, as all that bear resin are turned by excess of fat into pitch-wood, and when the roots too begin to grow fat they perish, like animals from too much fat, sometimes also by a plague among kinds, as among men now the slave households, now the plebs of town or country.

220| Some are worm-eaten more, some less, but nearly all are so, and birds find it out by the sound of the hollow bark. Now even this has begun to be a luxury, and the very big grubs of oaks are a rather dainty food—they call them cossi—and these too are fattened on meal, like birds for the table.

221| Pears, apples and figs feel this most of trees, less those that are bitter and fragrant. Of the worms that appear in figs, some are born from the figs themselves, others are produced by the one called cerastes; all however take the shape of the cerastes, and give out a sound of small shrill noise. The sorb tree too is infested by red and hairy worms and so dies; the medlar also in old age is subject to this disease.

222| Sideratio comes wholly from the sky. For this reason hail also is to be understood among these causes, and carbunculation, and what happens through the injury of hoarfrosts. For this, settling on the tender crops that are lured out by the warmth of spring and dare to burst forth, burns the milky eyes of the buds, which in the flower they call carbunculus. The nature of hoarfrost is more destructive, since falling it settles and freezes, and is not driven off even by any breeze, because it comes only when the air is still and clear. Yet the special mark of sideratio is the heat of droughts under the rising of the Dog Star, when grafted and young trees die, especially the fig and the vine.

223| The olive, besides worm-eating, which it feels equally with the fig, suffers also from the clavus, or, if one prefers to call it, fungus or patella. This is a burning by the sun. Cato hands down that red moss also does harm. Excessive fertility too does harm in most cases to vines and olives. Scab is common to all. Impetigo and cochleae, which are wont to grow on, are peculiar faults of figs, and not everywhere. For there are also some sicknesses of places.

224| But as man has torment of the sinews, so has the tree, and in two ways alike. For either the force of the disease breaks into the feet, that is, the roots, or into the joints, that is, the fingers of the tips, which go out farthest from the whole body. So they turn black, and among the Greeks each fault has its own name.

225| At first pain on every side, soon also a brittle leanness of these parts, finally wasting and death, the sap not entering or not arriving, and figs feel this most. The caprificus is exempt from all the things we have so far spoken of. Scab is produced by tenacious dews after the Vergiliae; for if they were more plentiful, they drench the tree, and do not scratch with scab, and the unripe figs fall; or if the rains were excessive, the fig suffers in another way, with soaked roots.

226| For vines, besides worm-eating and sideratio, a peculiar disease is articulatio, from three causes: one, the violence of storms when the buds are carried off; another, as Theophrastus noted, when they are cut out on the upturned side; the third, when they are hurt by ignorance of cultivation. For all their injuries are felt at the joints. A kind of sideratio also is the roratio on them as they finish flowering, or when the berries, before they grow, are cooked to a hardness. They sicken also when they have been chilled, the eyes of the trimmed vines being hurt by blight. And this comes of heat out of season, since all things depend on measure and a fixed balance.

227| Faults arise also from the fault of the cultivators, when the vines are bound too tightly, as has been said, or the digger has struck them with a hurtful blow, or even the underploughman unwittingly has dislocated the roots or scaled the body. There is also a certain bruising from a blunter knife. By all these causes they bear cold or heat with more difficulty, since every injury from outside passes into the sore. Weakest of all is the apple, and most of all the sweet one.

228| In some, debility brings barrenness, not death, as if one should take the top from a pine or a palm. For they become sterile and do not die. The fruits themselves, too, sometimes sicken without the tree, if at the necessary times rains or warmth or breezes have failed or, on the other hand, been in excess. For they fall or become worse. Worst of all is when a shower strikes the vine or the olive while it is finishing flowering, since the fruit falls away at once.

229| From the same cause are born also the urucae, a dire animal, and they eat off the foliage, and in some cases the flower also, of olives, as at Miletus, and leave the tree grazed over in an ugly state. This evil is born of moist and lingering warmth. Another comes from the same, if a sharper sun follows and scorches the very fault and so changes it. There is still another peculiar to olives and vines—they call it araneus—when, as with webs, they wrap the fruit round and consume it.

230| Certain blasts also burn these most, but other fruits too. For in certain [years] even the fruits themselves feel worm-eating of their own, apples, pears, medlars, pomegranates. In the olive the issue is doubtful, since those born beneath the skin take away the fruit, or increase it, if they have been in the very stone gnawing it. Rains that come after Arcturus prevent their being generated. The same, if they were southern, breed them in the druppae too, which then, as they ripen, are especially liable to fall. This happens more with irrigated trees, even if they have not fallen, and they must be rejected.

231| There are also kinds of gnats troublesome to some, as to acorns, to the fig; these appear to be born of moisture, especially of sweet moisture lying beneath the bark. And sickness for the most part is in these.

232| Certain causes of seasons or of places are not properly called diseases, since they kill at once, as wasting when it has attacked a tree, or blight, or a blast peculiar to some region, as in Apulia the atabulus, in Euboea the Olympias. For this, if it has blown about the winter solstice, scorches with cold and dries them so that no suns afterwards can restore them. Valleys and the land adjoining rivers suffer in this kind, and especially the vine, the olive, the fig.

233| When this has happened, it is at once detected in budding, in the olive more slowly. But in all it is a sign of reviving if they have lost their leaves. Otherwise those which you would think had got the better die. Sometimes the leaves dry up and the same revive. Other trees in northern lands, as Pontus, Thrace, suffer from cold or frost, if after the winter solstice it has continued for 40 days. And there and in the other parts, if a great freezing follows straight upon the bearing of fruit, it kills even in a few days.

234| Things that depend on the injury of men have their causes according to [….]. Pitch, oil, fat are hostile especially to young trees. With the bark stripped off in a ring they are killed, except the cork tree, which is even helped thereby; for as it thickens it chokes and strangles. Nor is the andrachle harmed, if the body is not cut at the same time. Otherwise also the cherry and the lime and the vine throw off a bark, but not the vital one nor that nearest the body, but the one that is driven out when another grows up beneath.

235| In some the bark is by nature cracked, as in plane trees. In the lime it grows again, all but a little. So for those whose scar it draws, they apply mud and dung as cure, and sometimes they do good, if no more violent force of cold or heat has followed. Some die more slowly in this way, as the robur and the quercus. The time of year also matters. For if one strips fir or pine while the sun is passing Taurus or Gemini, when they are budding, they die at once; the same injury suffered in winter they bear longer.

236| Likewise the ilex, the robur and the quercus. If the stripping was narrow, nothing is harmed in those mentioned above; but in the weaker, and in a thin soil, the stripping on one side only kills. Decapitation has a like effect on the picea, the cedar, the cypress—for these perish when the top is taken off or burnt with fire—and likewise grazing by animals.

237| The olive too, if a goat licks it, becomes sterile, Varro is our authority, as we have said. Some die of this injury, some only become worse, as almonds—for from sweet they are changed into bitter—and some even better, as among the Chians a pear which they call phocis.

238| For we have said for which trees cutting off the trunk is of benefit. Most perish also with the stock split, except the vine, apple, fig, pomegranates, and some even from a mere wound. The pine despises this injury, and all that produce resin. That they die when the roots are cut off is least surprising; many die also not with all cut, but with the largest cut off, or those among them which are vital.

239| They kill one another by shade or density and by robbery of nourishment. Ivy also kills by binding—mistletoe does no good—and cytisus, and it is killed by that which the Greeks call halimon. The nature of some does not indeed kill but harms by odour or a mixture of juice, as the radish and the laurel do the vine. For the vine is understood to be a smeller and to be tinged with odour in a wonderful way, and therefore, when it is near, to turn away and recede and flee the hostile flavour.

240| From this Androcydes took a remedy against drunkenness, directing the radish to be chewed. The vine hates also cabbage and every vegetable, hates also the hazel, unless they are far off, and is sad and sick. Natron and alum, hot sea water, and bean hulls or those of the ervum are the last of poisons.

241| Among the faults of trees there is room also for prodigies. We find figs born beneath the leaves, a vine and a pomegranate that bore fruit from the stock, not from shoot or branches, a vine bearing grapes without leaves, olives also that lost their leaves with the berries clinging. There are chance marvels too. For an olive wholly burnt has come to life again, and in Boeotia figs gnawed down by locusts have sprouted again.

242| Trees change even in colour, and from black become white, not always as a prodigy, but those most which are born from seed. The white poplar too passes into the black. Some think that the sorb, if it comes into warmer places, becomes sterile. As prodigies, however, sweet fruits become sour, or sweet from sour, figs from the caprificus or the contrary, a grave portent when they are changed for the worse, from olive to wild olive, from white grape and fig to black, or, as at Laodicea on the coming of Xerxes, a plane changed into an olive.

243| With portents of this kind the volume of Aristander among the Greeks teems, that we may not go on without end, and among us the commentaries of Gaius Epidius, in which trees are even found speaking. In the Cumaean territory a tree sank down as a grave portent a little before the civil wars of Pompey the Great, with a few branches projecting; it was found in the Sibylline books that there would be a destruction of men, and so much the greater the nearer to the City [afterwards] it was done.

244| There are prodigies too when trees spring up in strange places, as on the heads of statues or on altars, and when strange ones spring on trees themselves. A fig grew on a laurel at Cyzicus before the siege. In like manner at Tralles a palm on the base of Caesar the dictator about the time of his civil wars. And at Rome on the Capitol, on the altar of Jupiter, in the war of Perseus a palm that sprang up foretold victory and triumphs. When this was thrown down by storms, a fig sprang up in the same place in the lustrum of the censors Marcus Messala and Gaius Cassius, from which time Piso, a weighty authority, has handed down that chastity was overthrown.

245| Above all that has ever been heard of, there will be a prodigy in our own age, which happened in the ruin of the emperor Nero, in the Marrucine territory, in the olive grove of Vettius Marcellus, one of the first of the equestrian order, when the whole olive grove crossed the public road and the cornfields from the opposite side passed over into the place of the olive grove.

246| Now that the diseases of trees have been set out, it is fitting to speak of the remedies also. Of these some are common to all, some peculiar to certain ones. Common are baring the roots, heaping earth, letting the roots be blown on or covered, giving irrigation as drink or withholding it, dung for those exhausted of sap, pruning to relieve of burden, likewise, with the sap let out, a kind of drawing of blood, scraping round the bark, thinning of vines and subduing of shoots, and for the buds, if cold has made them withered and rough, a re-pumicing and a kind of polishing.

247| Of these some trees delight in more, some in fewer, as the cypress both disdains waters and dung and digging round and lopping, and hates all remedies, nay is even killed by irrigation; the vine and the pomegranates are especially nourished by them. The fig tree itself is nourished by irrigation, but its fruit withers. Almonds, if they are tended by digging, lose their flower.

248| Nor ought grafted trees to be dug round before they are strong enough to bear fruit. Most want what is burdensome and superfluous lopped from them, as we our nails and hair. Old ones are cut back entire and rise again from some sucker, but not all, only those whose nature we have said bears it.

249| Irrigation is useful in the heats of summer, hostile in winter, in autumn varying also with the nature of the soil, since the vintager of the Spains gathers grapes on standing water. For the rest, in the greater part of the world it is fitting to divert even the autumn rains. About the rising of the Dog Star irrigation is most beneficial, and not even then excessive, since it harms by making the roots drunk. And age tempers the measure, for young ones thirst less. Those that are used to it most need watering; on the contrary, those born in dry places do not seek moisture except what is necessary.

250| Rougher wines at all events desire watering in the Sulmo territory of Italy, in the Fabian district, where they water the fields too. And it is wonderful: grasses are killed by the water, crops are nourished, and the watering is in place of the hoe. In the same territory in winter—so much the more if snows lie or frost—lest the cold burn the vines, they pour around it from the irrigation, which there they call warming, a memorable nature in a river of the sun, the same of a chill hardly to be borne in summer.

251| The remedies for carbunculi and robigines we shall show in the next volume. Meanwhile there is also a kind of scarification among remedies, when, because the bark is lean from sickness and draws itself tight and presses the vital parts of trees more than is right, they press the sharpened edge of the knife with both hands and open it with continuous cuts and as it were loosen the skin. That this was wholesome is proved by the scars, which widen and are filled up by the body growing within,

252| and in great part the medicine of men and of trees is alike, since in them also the bones are bored. Almonds are made sweet from bitter, if, the stock being dug round and bored through round the lowest part, the phlegm that flows is wiped away. And from elms the useless sap is drawn off, by boring above ground to the pith, in old age, or when they are felt to be overflowing with too much nourishment.

253| The same is done also for figs with a swollen bark, by light slanting cuts. So it comes about that the fruit does not fall. For fruit trees which bud and do not bear, a stone is put in a split root, and they become fertile; the same is done in almonds with a wedge of oak driven in, in pears and sorbs with pine-wood and ash and earth covering it.

254| It is also beneficial to trim round the roots of vines and fig trees that are growing too luxuriantly, and to put ashes on the trimmed roots. Figs are made to ripen late if the first unripe figs are pulled off when they have grown larger than a bean; for others grow up underneath which ripen later. Fig trees also become sturdier and more fruitful if, when they begin to come into leaf, the tips of every branch are pulled off; for caprification ripens the fruit.

255| In caprification it is clear that gnats are born from the unripe wild figs, since when they have flown out no seeds are found inside, and it is evident that the seeds have turned into the gnats. So great is their eagerness to get out that most of them break out leaving a foot or part of a wing behind. There is also another kind of gnat, which they call centrinae, like the drones of bees in their idleness and malice, to the ruin of the true and useful ones;

256| for they kill them and die along with them. Moths too attack the seeds of figs; the remedy against them is to bury a cutting of lentiscus in the same trench, upside down, with the end that was the top downward. Rubrica mixed with amurca and poured on the roots together with dung, when the trees begin to come into leaf, makes fig trees most productive. Of wild figs, the black ones and the ones growing in rocky places are most highly praised, since they have the most seeds. Caprification itself is done after rain.

257| Above all, care must be taken that faults do not arise from the remedies, as happens when treatment is excessive or ill-timed. Thinning out is good for trees, but cutting them back every year is most harmful. Only the vine requires pruning every year; the myrtle, the pomegranate and the olive need it every other year, because they quickly put out shoots. The rest should be pruned less often, none in autumn, and they should not even be scraped except in spring. In pruning, the wound to the vital parts [….] everything is, whatever is not superfluous.

258| The same principle holds for dung. Trees delight in it, but care must be taken not to apply it in the heat of the sun, not to apply it unseasoned, and not stronger than is needed. Pig dung burns vines unless five years have been allowed to pass, except when it is diluted by watering; and so does the refuse of tanners unless mixed with water, and likewise if it is put on too freely. The right amount is thought to be 3 modii for every 10 square feet. But the nature of the soil will decide this.

259| With pigeon dung and pig dung they also treat the wounds of trees. If pomegranates grow sour, they recommend that the roots be laid bare and pig dung put on them; in that year the fruit will be winy, and in the next sweet. Others think the trees should be watered with human urine mixed with water four times a year, an amphora each time, or that the tops should be sprinkled with wine in which laser has been dissolved; if the pomegranates split on the tree, the stalk should be twisted; for figs in any case, amurca should be poured on, and for other sickly trees the lees of wine, or else lupine should be sown around their roots.

260| Water in which lupine has been boiled, poured round the trees, is also good for the fruit. Figs drop when it has thundered at the Volcanalia; the remedy is to strew the threshing floors with barley straw beforehand. Lime applied to the roots makes cherries early and forces them to ripen. With these too, as with all fruit, it is better to thin them out, so that those left may grow larger.

261| Some trees are improved by punishment or roused by a sharp bite, like palms and the lentiscus; for they are nourished with salt water. Ashes have the force of salt, but a milder one; so they are sprinkled on figs and on rue, so that they may not become wormy and their roots may not rot. Moreover, they recommend pouring salt water on the roots of vines too, if they are inclined to weep; but if their fruit falls, ashes should be sprinkled with vinegar, and the vines themselves smeared with it, or with sandaraca if the grapes rot; and if they are not fertile, they should be watered and smeared with ashes worked up with sharp vinegar;

262| and if they do not ripen their fruit, which withers first, the vines should be cut back to the roots, and the wound and the root fibres soaked in sharp vinegar and stale urine, then covered over with this mud, and dug about often. In the case of olives, if they have promised too little fruit, people lay their roots bare to the winter cold, and they profit from this chastisement. All these things depend on the year's weather, and are sometimes needed later, sometimes sooner. Fire too is beneficial in some cases, as with the reed; for when it has been burned it comes up thicker and softer.

263| Cato also compounds certain medicines, distinguishing the quantities as well: he directs that an amphora be poured on the roots of the larger trees and an urna on those of the smaller, of amurca and water in equal parts, the roots having first been gradually laid bare; for the olive, in addition, straw is first to be placed round it, and likewise for the fig; and for the fig especially, earth is to be heaped up round the roots in spring. In this way, he says, the unripe figs will not fall, the yield will be greater, and the tree will not become scabby.

264| In the same way, so that the convolvolus may not appear in a vineyard, he directs that 2 congii of amurca be boiled down to the thickness of honey, and then boiled again with a third part of bitumen and a quarter part of sulphur, in the open air, since it catches fire under a roof. The vines are to be smeared with this around their heads and under their arms, and so there will be no convolvolus. Some are content to fumigate the vineyards with the smoke of this mixture, with the wind behind it, for three days running.

265| Most people think there is no less help and nourishment in urine than Cato thought there was in amurca, provided only that an equal part of water is added, since by itself it does harm. Some give the name volucre to a creature that gnaws the young grapes as they come on. To prevent this, they wipe their pruning hooks, after they have been sharpened, with a beaver's skin, and prune with them so; or they smear the same hooks with bear's blood after pruning.

266| Ants too are pests of trees. People drive them away by smearing the trunks with rubrica and liquid pitch; they also collect them in one place by hanging a fish nearby, or smear the roots with crushed lupine mixed with oil. Many kill both these and moles with amurca; and against caterpillars, and to keep apples from rotting, they recommend touching the tops of the trees with the gall of a green lizard; but against caterpillars in particular, that a woman at the onset of her monthly period should walk round each tree barefoot and with her girdle loosened.

267| Likewise, so that no animal may crop the foliage with harmful grazing, the leaves should be sprinkled with diluted cow dung each time rain falls, since the potency of the remedy is washed off by it. Human ingenuity devises some remarkable things, seeing that most people believe hailstorms can be turned aside by a charm, the words of which I for my part would not venture to include in earnest, although Cato published words to be joined to split reeds against dislocated limbs. The same Cato allowed sacred trees and groves to be felled, a sacrifice having first been made, and he gave the method and the prayer for it in the same book.

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