write." In the orchards were plums, apples, pears, walnuts, filberts; and
in noblemen's orchards store of strange fruit-apricots, almonds, peaches,
figs, and even in some oranges, lemons, and capers. Grafters also were at
work with their artificial mixtures, "dallying, as it were, with nature
and her course, as if her whole trade were perfectly known unto them: of
hard fruits they will make soft, of sour sweet, of sweet yet more
delicate; bereaving also some of their kernels, others of their cores,
and finally endowing them with the flavor of musk, amber, or sweet spices
at their pleasure." Gardeners turn annual into perpetual herbs, and such
pains are they at that they even used dish-water for plants. The Gardens
of Hesperides are surely not equal to these. Pliny tells of a rose that
had sixty leaves on one bud, but in 1585 there was a rose in Antwerp that
had one hundred and eighty leaves; and Harrison might have had a slip of
it for ten pounds, but he thought it a "tickle hazard." In his own little
garden, of not above three hundred square feet, he had near three hundred
samples, and not one of them of the common, or usually to be had.

Our kin beyond sea have always been stout eaters of solid food, and in
Elizabeth's time their tables were more plentifully laden than those of
any other nation. Harrison scientifically accounts for their inordinate
appetite. "The situation of our region," he says, "lying near unto the
north, does cause the heat of our stomachs to be of somewhat greater
force; therefore our bodies do crave a little more ample nourishment than
the inhabitants of the hotter regions are accustomed withal, whose
digestive force is not altogether so vehement, because their internal
heat is not so strong as ours, which is kept in by the coldness of the
air, that from time to time (specially in winter) doth environ our
bodies." The north Britons in old times were accustomed often to great
abstinence, and lived when in the woods on roots and herbs. They used
sometimes a confection, "whereof so much as a bean would qualify their