CHAPTER VII.
_Of the Ash._ 1.

_Fraxinus_ the ash, is with us reputed male and female, the one affecting the higher grounds; the other the plains, of a whiter wood, and rising many times to a prodigious stature; so as in forty years from the key, an ash hath been sold for thirty pounds sterling: And I have been credibly inform'd, that one person hath planted so much of this one sort of timber in his life time, as hath been valued worth fifty thousand pounds to be bought.

These are pretty encouragements, for a small and pleasant industry.

That there is a lower, and more knotty sort, every husbandman can distinguish.
2.

The keys or toungs being gathered from a young thriving tree when they begin to fall (which is about the end of October, and the ensuing month) are to be laid to dry, and then sowed any time betwixt that and Christmas; but not altogether so deep as your somer masts: Thus they do in Spain, from whence it were good to procure some of the keys from their best trees: A very narrow seminary will be sufficient to store a whole country: They will lie a full year in the ground before they appear; therefore you must carefully fence them all that time, and have patience: But if you would make a considerable wood of them at once, dig, or plow a parcel of ground, as you would prepare it for corn, and with the corn, especially oats, (or what other grain you think fittest) sow also good store of keys, some crab-kernels, &c.