use
is to be attributed primarily that wonderful velvety turf which is so
unmatchable elsewhere; to the same cause, and to the accompanying even
temperature, is to be credited very much of the success of the
turnip-culture, which has within a century revolutionized the
agriculture of Kugland; yet again, the magical effects of a thorough
system of drainage are nowhere so demonstrable as in a soil constantly
wetted, and giving a steady flow, however small, to the discharging
tile. Measured by inches, the rain-fall is greater in most parts of
America than in Great Britain; but this fall is so capricious with us,
often so sudden and violent, that there must be inevitably a large
surface-discharge, even though the tile, three feet below, is in working
order. The true theory of skilful drainage is, not to carry away the
quick flush of a shower, but to relieve a soil too heavily saturated by
opening new outflows, setting new currents astir of both air and
moisture, and thus giving new life and an enlarged capacity to lands
that were dead with a stagnant over-soak.

Bearing in mind, then, the conditions of the British climate, which are
so much in keeping with the "wet weather" of these studies, let us go
back again to old Markham's day, and amble along--armed with our
umbrellas--through the current of the seventeenth century.

James I., that conceited old pedant, whose "Counterblast to Tobacco" has
worked the poorest of results, seems to have had a nice taste for
fruits; and Sir Henry Wotton, his ambassador at Venice, writing from
that city in 1622, says,--"I have sent the choicest melon-seeds of all
kinds, which His Majesty doth expect, as I had order both from ray Lord
Holderness and from Mr. Secretary Calvert." Sir Henry sent also with the
seeds very particular directions for the culture of the plants, obtained
probably from some head-gardener of a Priuli or a Morosini, whose melons
had the full beat of Italian sunshine upon the south slopes of the
Vicentine mountains. The same ambassador sends at that date to Lord
Holderness "a double-flowering yellow rose, of no ordinary nature";[3]
and it would be counted of no ordinary nature now, if what he avers be
true, that "it flowreth every month from May till almost Christmas."

King James took special interest in the establishment of his garden at
the Theobald Palace in Hertfordshire: there were clipped hedges, neat
array of linden avenues, fountains, and a Mount of Venus with