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.John's Colleges; and to ransack the bookshops of that seat of learning for such works as might be procurable in no more difficult tongue than the Latin.
In this way Captain Barker became possessed of a vast number of monkish herbals, Pliny's _Historia Naturalis_, the _Herbarum Vivas Eicones_ of Brunsfels, the treatises of Tragus, Fuchsius, Matthiolus, Ebn Beithar and Conrad Gesner, the _Stirpium Adversaria Nova_ and _Plantarum seu Stirpium Historia_ of Matthew Lobel, with the works of such living botanists as Henshaw, Hook, Grew and Malpighi.
As the Captain had no thought of resuming a seafaring life, he felt confident of digesting in time these masses of learning, though it annoyed him at first to find himself capable of understanding but a tenth of what he read.

On summer evenings he would sit out on the lawn, with a folio balanced on his knee, and do violence to Mr.Swiggs's ears with such learned terms as "Boraginiae," "Cucurbitaceae," "Leguminosae," and as winter drew in, master and man would hold long consultations indoors over certain plants, the portraits of which in the herbals seemed familiar enough, though their habitats often proved, on further reading, to lie no nearer than Arabia Felix or the Spice Islands.

Nevertheless, they took some practical steps.

To begin with, the soil of the garden before the Blue Pavilion was entirely changed--Captain Barker importing from The Hague no less than thirty tons of the mould most approved by the Dutch tulip-growers.

A tank, too, was sunk at the back of the building towards the marsh, as a receptacle and reservoir for rain-water; and by Tristram's fourth birthday his adoptive father began to build, on the south side of the house, a hibernatory, or greenhouse, differing in size only from that which Solomon de Caus had the honour to erect for the Elector Palatine in his gardens at Heidelberg.
Meanwhile Captain Runacles, who watched these operations from the other side of the privet hedge and picked up many scraps of rumour from the antique Simeon, was consumed with scorn and envy.
The two friends no longer spoke.