you would, grain from chaff; put the seeds soaking in lukewarm water for eight-and-forty hours; took the seeds out of the water, and mixed them with finely-sifted fresh earth, ten gallons of earth to one gallon of seeds; put the mixture upon a smooth place upon the bare ground; turned and re-mixed the heap every day, for four or five days, keeping it covered with a mat whenever the turning and mixing was not going on; and, as soon as I perceived here and there a root beginning to appear, I sowed the seeds upon a bed of sifted earth, mixed with the sifted mould just as they came out of the heap.

474. There the seeds lay then, pretty nearly as thick as they could well lay, on the top of the ground. In this state I watered them gently every evening with a fine-rosed watering pot, kept them securely shaded from the sun by mats, by the means of frames or hoops to keep the mats from touching the ground, and took the mats off every evening at about an hour after sun-set. In about a week, I saw the roots coming out at the point of the nail, and going down into the ground. Soon afterwards, the nails, as I call them, began to raise their heads. In a few days they were all standing bolt upright, and in a few days more, the rusty looking coat was shuffled off, and out came the seed leaves, resembling, as nearly as possible, the seed leaves of the Red Beet-root, or those of the Mangel Wurzel.

475. After this, I shaded the plants less and less, till they became hardy enough to be exposed during the whole of the day. Instead of being done in April, this work was not done until the month of July; and therefore the plants were a mere nothing in point of size in the month of October; and were hardly in a condition to resist the frost without some degree of covering. I am now about to plant them

out, and they will, I dare say, be very fine plants by the next fall. In this manner they will stand in the seed-bed, at less than an inch apart. A small space will give you thousands and thousands of plants, at the expense of a very few shillings.

476. As to the treatment of the plants after the seed-bed, they should be put into a nursery in the manner directed for the ASH. They have excellent roots, move without risk, strike off at once; and if, by early frosts or some other accident, the leading shoot be injured, you have only to cut off the injured part, down to the first live bud you come to: another leader comes immediately; the little crook that is made by the change of the leader is completely grown out the first year, and the tree grows up as straight as a rush. These trees might stand one year or even two in the nursery, before being finally planted out; but they should not stand longer, if you mean to have straight and beautiful trees. Whether planted in clumps or in single trees, there must be an effectual fence extending in such a way as to be at five feet distance from the trunk of the tree in every direction. It is little short of a mark of idiocy to plant trees, and especially trees for ornament, and then to turn cattle in to eat them! Yet, how often is this done! The ground ought to be kept clean until the tree attains a good height. If you plant large trees, they must and they will be leaning trees. The wind will make them take a leaning posture, before the root be sufficiently powerful to cause them to stand in an erect attitude. The roots of trees are their foundations, their buttresses, their spurs; and if these do not come until after the tree begins to lean on one side, they will indeed prevent it from falling, as an old wall is prevented from falling by buttresses placed against it; but, as these will never make the wall to stand upright, so the

roots of a tree will never restore it to its erect attitude, if it once begin to lean.

477. The Plane should, like most other deciduous trees, be cut down to the ground the year after it is planted out; it will then send up a surprisingly strong shoot; and the trunk will go on in a manner as straight as a gun-stick. As it goes on rising, the lower side-shoots should be taken off, always cutting close with a sharp knife, until you have got a clear trunk to the length that you desire.

THE POPLAR.

In Latin, Populus; in French, Peuplier.

478. The Botanical characters are :-The male and female flowers grow upon separate trees. The male flowers or katkins have one oblong, loose, cylindrical empalement, which is imbricated. Under each scale, which is oblong, plain, and cut on the border, is situated a single flower without any petal, having a nectarium of one leaf, turbinated at the bottom, and tubulus at the top, and eight stamina terminated by large four-cornered summits. The female flowers are in katkins, like the male, but have no stamina; they have an oval, acute-pointed germen, with scarcely any style, crowned by a four-pointed stigma. The germen becomes afterwards an oval capsule, with two cells, including many oval seeds having hairy down.

479. This is a very numerous, and, according to my taste, is, for the most part, a very worthless family of trees. They all bear a seed in katkins, which come out early in the spring, and the seed contained in which is ripe when the katkins fall, which is generally late in May, or the beginning of June. All the sorts may be raised from cuttings. A cutting, or truncheon, stuck into the ground, produces

the tree; and, in general, a very ugly tree it is; but it grows fast, yields a great deal of stuff to make rough boards of, outgrows a FIR beyond all comparison, and makes good stuff for packing-cases, and other things for which pasteboard is a little too weak.

480. The sorts that we have in England, are the ABELE TREE (Populus Alba); the ASPEN (Populus Tremula); the BLACK POPLAR (Populus Nigra); and that well-known great, staring, ugly thing, called the LOMBARDy Poplar, which, to all its other amiable qualities, is very apt to furnish its neighbours with a surplus population of caterpillar and other abominable insects. The first of these, the ABELE, is, however, a really fine tree, grows to a great size and great height, especially near running water, and produces timber, by no means to be despised. The wood takes a fine polish, it is close-grained, though light; and is, take it altogether, and considering all its uses, far preferable to the wood of the ELM; but I have never seen it of any considerable size, except in rich land, or very near to running water.

481. The largest I ever saw, and the loftiest also, stands opposite to a fine farm-house, near the Thames, on the road from Hampton to Chertsey Bridge. The leaves of this tree are white on the under side, and give the tree a white appearance when blown up by the wind. The trunk, also, is of a whitish hue, speckled with black. This tree throws up abundance of suckers. If standing where the suckers are mowed off by the scythe at hay-cutting time, it will send up a new crop for the next year. Hence, this fine tree is always raised from suckers. Like parent like child, and the young trees send out suckers, and infest the whole neighbourhood with them, by the time they attain the

height of ten or twenty feet. These suckers are put into nurseries when they are small, stand there till they are large; and then, when planted out, are sure to lean on one side.

482. The ASPEN has a little round leaf that is continually in motion when there is a breath of wind. The wood of this tree is certainly good for as little as any wood can well be. It is found in almost all our coppices; and it continues to be found there, because people do not take the pains to root it out. I never heard of any man that ever thought of raising, or that ever wished to have, an Aspen tree. If there should happen to be such a man, he may be gratified at any time, by cutting off a truncheon in February, of about two or three feet long, and sticking one-half of it into the ground. The tree will come from this simple operation, and this is a great deal more pains than it is worth.

483. The BLACK POPLAR, or, as it is more frequently called, the BLACK ITALIAN POPLAR, is a surprising thing for quickness of growth. It is almost incredible, the size to which a tree of this sort will attain in good ground in the course of fifteen or twenty years. I planted some of these trees in the plantation mentioned in paragraph 350. They were, when planted, of about the same height of the rest of the trees; but, at the end of seven or eight years, they were so lofty and so big, that the plantation looked like here and there an old tree, with a parcel of little ones planted round it. They were twice as big, and half as high again, even as the LocusTs. Thus situated, they were a great dissight to the plantation, and I cut them down, and tore up the roots, to put a stop to their breeding of suckers. At the same time, I thinned out the LocusTs, had the