"
"They're all you'll have a chance of making, at any rate. And I
answer them thus: If the worst comes to the worst, I'll cover the
whole of this property with a couple of tubs, one to catch rain-water
and t'other filled with garden mould. If the sea rots 'em, I'll have
the whole estate careened, and its bottom pitched and its seams
stopped with oakum. I'll rig up a battery here, and if the
water-butt runs dry you shall blaze away at the guns till you fetch
the rain down, as I've seen it fetched down before now by a
cannonade. But I mean to have a garden here, and a garden I'll
have."
Faithful to this resolve, Captain Barker set to work to study the art
in which Tristram was to be instructed, and, being by nature a hater
of superficiality, determined to begin by acquainting himself with
everything that had been written about the nature and habits of
plants from the earliest ages to that present day. He engaged a
young demy of Magdalen College, Oxford--son of Mr. Lucas, saddler, of
the High Street, Harwich--who was much pinched to continue his
studies at the University, to extract and translate for him whatever
Aristotle, Theophrastus and others of the Peripatetic school had
written on the subject; to search the college libraries for
information concerning the horticulture of China and Persia, the
hanging gardens of Babylon, those planted by the learned Abdullatif
at Bagdad, and the European paradises of Naples, Florence, Monza,
Mannheim and Leyden to draw up plans and a particular description of
the Oxford Physic Garden, by Magdalen College, as well as the
plantations of Worcester, Trinity and St.
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