 Referring to classical treaties by Theophrastus, Columella, Pliny, Virgil, and more recent authors as for instance Pontano and Sannazzaro, Porta discusses plants that had been known and in use before the discovery of the Americas. Even so Villae was innovative in several respects: it was the first text to dedicate an entire treatise to the cultivation of olives, as well as one on on grafting. This latter topic is especially interesting because it firmly links Portas agriculture to his ideas on natural magic. In general the Villae betray an implicit astrological agenda as Porta conceives of plants as recipients of celestial influx. As Wechsel, Porta’s German publisher of the Villae, noted with exasperation, the long manuscript was in such a terrible state, fraught with so many grammatical and orthographic errors that it had to be most thoroughly emended; yet and regrettably in several places the meaning of a passage “was not to be recovered by another Oedipus.” Even though Wechsel exonerates the author by putting the blame on a corrupt manuscript, his vindication of Porta remains ambiguous because the editor also says that the extent of his emendations become obvious in a comparison of his edition to the Olivetum, which had been published eight years earlier, in 1584. Much the same can be said about the De furtivis litterarum notis, which is fraught with misspellings, no small matter in a text that is on decoding. These examples indicate that Porta was much more of a prolific author than a careful editor of his texts.