Note 32 — English Authors on Gardening.

In the above tract of Dr. Beale's, he thus breaks out in praise of the Orchards of this deep and rich county:—"From the greatest person to the poorest cottager, all habitations are encompassed with orchards, and gardens, and in most places our hedges are enriched with rows of fruit trees, pears or apples. All our villages, and generally all our highways, (all our vales being thick set with rows of villages), are in the spring time sweetened and beautified with the blossomed trees, which continue their changeable varieties of ornament, till (in the end of autumn), they fill our garners with pleasant fruit, and our cellars with rich and winy liquors. Orchards, being the pride of our county, do not only sweeten, but also purify the ambient air, which I conceive to conduce very much to the constant health and long lives for which our county hath always been famous. We do commonly devise a shadowy walk from our gardens, through our orchards (which is the richest, sweetest, and most embellished grove) into our coppice woods, or timber woods." Dr. Beale does not praise the whole of their land. He describes some as "starvy, chapt, and cheany, as the basest land upon the Welch mountains." He makes amends, however, for this, for he describes the nags bred on their high grounds, as very different from our present hackney-coach horses; they "are airey and sinewy, full of spirits and vigour, in shape like the barbe, they rid ground, and gather courage and delight in their own speed."