“The hoppe that liketh not his entertainment, namely his seat, his ground, his keeper, or the manner of his setting, comith up thick and rough in leaves, very like unto a nettle; and will be much bitten with a little black flye, who, also, will not do harme unto good hoppes, who if she leave the leaf as full of holes as a nettle, yet she seldome proceedeth to the utter destruction of the Hoppe; where the garden standeth bleake, the heat of summer will reform this matter.”

Thomas Tusser, who lived 1515 to 1580, in his Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, included many seasonable verses on Hop-growing, among which the following are worth quoting: 

MAY.

     Get into thy hop-yard for now it is time
       To teach Robin Hop on his pole how to climb,
     To follow the sun, as his property is,
       And weed him and trim him if aught go amiss.

JUNE.

     Whom fancy perswadeth among other crops,
       To have for his spending sufficient of hops: 
     Must willingly follow of choices to chuse
       Such lessons approved, as skilfull do use.

     Ground gravelly, sandy, and mixed with clay,
       Is naughty for hops, any manner of way;
     Or if it be mingled with rubbish and stone,
       For dryness and barrenness let it alone.

     Chuse soil for the hop of the rottenest mould,
       Well dunged and wrought as a garden plot should: 
     Not far from the water (but not overflown),
       This lesson well noted is meet to be known.

     The sun in the south, or else southly and west,
       Is joy to the hop, as welcomed ghest: 
     But wind in the north, or else northerly east,
       To hop is as ill, as a fray in a feast.

     Meet plot for a hop-yard, once found as is told,
       Make thereof account, as of jewell of gold: 
     Now dig it and leave it the sun for to burn,
       And afterward fence it to serve for that turn.

     The hop for his profit, I thus do exalt,
       It strengtheneth drink and it favoureth malt,
     And being well brewed, long kept it will last,
       And drawing abide, if ye draw not too fast.

In Worcestershire and Herefordshire hop-gardens are always called hop-yards, which seems to be only a local and more ancient form of the same word, and from the same root.  The termination occurs also in “orchard”—­from the Anglo-Saxon ortgeard (a wort-yard) —­“olive-yard,” and “vineyard.”

The quotation from the Perfitie Platforme of a Hoppe Garden refers to “a little black flye,” now called “the flea” (Worcestershire plural “flen"), really a beetle like the “turnip fly,” and it is the first pest that attacks the hop every year.

     “First the flea, then the fly,
     Then the lice, and then they die,”