given, after manuring, as the Rhodians use. This then is matter for enquiry; it may be that there are two distinct methods of cultivation, and that dung, if accompanied by watering,[1] is beneficial, though without it it is harmful. [2]When the tree is a year old, they transplant it and give plenty[3] of salt, and this treatment is repeated when it is two years old, for it delights greatly in being transplanted.
[4]Most transplant in the spring, but the people of Babylon about the rising of the dog-star, and this is the time when most people propagate it, since it then germinates and grows more quickly. As long as it is young, they do not touch it, except that they tie up the foliage, so that it may grow straight[5] and the slender branches may not hang down.[6] At a later stage they prune it, when it is more vigorous and has become a stout tree, leaving the slender branches only about a handsbreadth long. So long as it is young, it produces its fruit without a stone, but later on the fruit has a stone.
However some say that the people of Syria use no cultivation, except cutting out wood and watering, also that the date-palm requires spring water rather than water from the skies and that such water is abundant in the valley in which are the palm-groves. And they add that the Syrians say that this valley[7] extends through Arabia to the Red Sea,[8] and that many profess to have visited it,[9] and that it is in the lowest part of it that the date-palms grow. Now both accounts may be true, for it is not strange that
