116And indeed, were I not already furling my sails near the very end of my labours and hastening to turn my prow towards land, perhaps I would sing too what careful tillage adorns rich gardens, and the rose-beds of twice-bearing Paestum, and how endive rejoices in the streams it drinks, and banks green with celery, and how the cucumber, twisting through the grass, swells into a belly; 122nor would I have kept silent about the late-flowering narcissus or the stem of the curling acanthus, and pale ivy and myrtle that loves the shore. 125For I remember that under the towers of the Oebalian citadel, where dark Galaesus waters the yellowing fields, I saw an old Corycian who had a few acres of abandoned land, and that soil was neither fertile for bullocks nor suited to the flock nor favourable to Bacchus.
130Yet here, planting sparse vegetables among the brambles, and white lilies around them, and vervain and slender poppy, he matched the wealth of kings in spirit, and returning home late at night he would load his table with unbought feasts. 134He was the first to pick the rose in spring and fruit in autumn, and when gloomy winter was still splitting rocks with cold and curbing the course of the waters with ice, he was already cutting the bloom of the soft hyacinth, chiding the late summer and the lingering West Winds. 139So he too was the first to abound in breeding bees and a great swarm, and to collect the foaming honey from the pressed combs; 141he had limes and the richest pine, and as many fruits as the fertile tree had clothed itself with in its fresh blossom, so many it kept ripe in autumn.
144He also planted out in rows elms well grown, and the hardy pear, and blackthorns already bearing plums, and the plane already giving shade to drinkers. 147But these things I myself, shut out by the narrow limits of space, pass by, and leave for others after me to tell.