published his own four-canto poem on the subject of Les Jardins, ou l'Art d’embellir les paysages (Gardens, or the art of beautifying landscape, 1782). Like Mason, he gave his preference for landscaped over formal garden design and his work was several times translated into English verse over the following two decades. Rural pursuits In the case of many of these didactic manuals, the approach of the Georgics served as a model but the information in them is updated or supplements Virgil’s account. Thus Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai's Le Api (Bees, 1542) restricts itself to the subject of the fourth book of the Georgics and is an early example of Italian blank verse. A Latin treatment of the subject figured as the fourteenth book of the original Paris edition of :fr:Jacques Vanière's Praedium Rusticum (The Rural Estate) in 1696, but was to have a separate English existence in a verse translation by Arthur Murphy published from London in 1799, and later reprinted in the United States in 1808. But an earlier partial adaptation, Joshua Dinsdale's The Modern Art of Breeding Bees, had already appeared in London in 1740, prefaced with an apology to Virgil for trespassing on his ancient territory while bringing "some new Discov'ries to impart". For his part, Marco Girolamo Vida struck out in a new entomological direction with his poem on the breeding and care of the silkworm, the two-canto De Bombycum cura ac usu (1527) written in Latin hexameters, which had been preceded by two poems in Italian on the same subject. Vida's work was followed in England by Thomas Muffet's The Silkwormes and their Flies (1599), a subject that he had studied in Italy. The poem was written in Ottava rima, contained a wealth of Classical stories and has been mentioned as "one of the earliest of English georgic poems". Vida's poem was just one among several contemporary Latin works on exotic subjects that have been defined by Yasmin Haskell as 'recreational georgics', a group which "usually comprises one or two short books, treats self-consciously small-scale subjects, is informed by an almost pastoral mood" and deals with products for the aristocratic luxury market. Others included Giovanni Pontano's De Hortis Hesdperidum sive de cultu citriorum on the cultivation of citrus fruits (Venice 1505) and Pier Franceso Giustolo's De Croci Cultu Cultu on the cultivation of saffron (Rome 1510). There were also works on hunting like Natale Conti's