are most valued for width, which is secured, as in lettuces, by placing a light weight on them when they have begun to assume their colour. No other garden plant grows broader: occasionally beets spread out to two feet across, the nature of the soil also contributing a great deal to this, inasmuch as the widest spreading beets grow in the territory of Circeii. Some people think that beets are best sown when the pomegranate is in blossom, and transplanted when they have begun to make five leaves; and that by a remarkable difference (if this really exists) white beet acts as a purge and black beet as an astringent; and that when the flavour of wine in a cask is getting spoiled by ‘cabbage’,^a it can be restored to what it was by plunging in some leaves of beet.

XLI. Cabbages and kales which now have preeminenceCabbages. in gardens, I do not find to have been held in honour among the Greeks; but Cato sings marvellousR.R. CLVI. f. praises of the head of cabbage, which we shall repeat when we deal with medicine. He classifies cabbagesXX. 78 ff. as follows—a kind with the leaves wide open and a large stalk, another with a crinkly leaf, which is called celery-cabbage, and a third with very small stalks; the last is a smooth and tender cabbage, and he puts it lowest in value. Cabbage is sown all the year round, since it is also cut all the year round, but it pays best to sow it at the autumnal equinox; and it is transplanted when it has made five leaves. In the next spring after its first sowing it yields sprout-cabbage; this is a sort of small sprout from the actual cabbage stalks, of a more delicate and tender quality, though it was despised by the fastidious taste of Apicius^b and owing to him by Drusus