colony of Harar in Abyssinia, for here it was, about the fifteenth
century, that the Arabs, having found the plant growing wild in the
Abyssinian highlands, first gave it intensive cultivation. The complete
story of the early cultivation of coffee in the old and new worlds is
told in chapter II, which deals with the history of the propagation of
the coffee plant.

La Roque[314] was the first to tell how the plant was cultivated and the
berries prepared for market in Arabia, where it was brought from
Abyssinia.

The Arabs raised it from seed grown in nurseries, transplanting it to
plantations laid out in the foot-hills of the mountains, to which they
conducted the mountain streams by ingeniously constructed small channels
to water the roots. They built trenches three feet wide and five feet
deep, lining them with pebbles to cause the water to sink deep into the
earth with which the trenches were filled, to preserve the moisture from
too rapid evaporation. These were so constructed that the water could be
turned off into other channels when the fruit began to ripen. In
plantations exposed to the south, a kind of poplar tree was planted
along the trenches to supply needful shade.

La Roque noted that the coffee trees in Yemen were planted in lines,
like the apple trees in Normandy; and that when they were much exposed
to the sun, the shade poplars were regularly introduced between the
rows.

Such cultivation as the plant received in early Abyssinia and Arabia was
crude and primitive at best. Throughout the intervening centuries, there
has been little improvement in Yemen; but modern cultural methods obtain
in the Harar district in Abyssinia.

Like the Arabs in Yemen, the Harari cultivated in small gardens,
employing the same ingenious system of irrigation from mountain springs
to water the roots of the plants at least once a week during the dry
season. In Yemen and in Abyssinia the ripened berries were sun-dried on
beaten-earth barbecues.

The European planters who carried the cultivation of the bean to the Far
East and to America followed the best Arabian practise, changing, and
sometimes improving it, in order to adapt it to local conditions.

_Coffee Cultivation in General_

Today the commercial growers of coffee on a large scale practise
intensive cultivation methods, giving the same care to preparing their
plantations and maintaining their trees as do other growers of grains
and fruits. As in the more adva