Ornamental Plants Quotes

Your body is a sanctuary, a place where love and grief flow like crashing rapids against your spine. Its time to take your hands off of your thighs, and your gaze off of the marks that adorn your hips like ornaments.   The universe gave up celestial pieces of itself to sculpt you. It is time to honor that.

Turn that worthless lawn into a beautiful garden of food whose seeds are stories sown, whose foods are living origins. Grow a garden on the flat roof of your apartment building, raise bees on the roof of your garage, grow onions in the iris bed, plant fruit and nut trees that bear, don't plant 'ornamentals', and for God's sake don't complain about the ripe fruit staining your carpet and your driveway; rip out the carpet, trade food to someone who raises sheep for wool, learn to weave carpets that can be washed, tear out your driveway, plant the nine kinds of sacred berries of your ancestors, raise chickens and feed them from your garden, use your fruit in the grandest of ways, grow grapevines, make dolmas, wine, invite your fascist neighbors over to feast, get to know their ancestral grief that made them prefer a narrow mind, start gardening together, turn both your griefs into food; instead of converting them, convert their garage into a wine, root, honey, and cheese cellar--who knows, peace might break out, but if not you still have all that beautiful food to feed the rest and the sense of humor the Holy gave you to know you're not worthless because you can feed both the people and the Holy with your two little able fists.

In time, the aliens would come to understand almost everything about us—our ceaseless yearning, our habit of wandering, how we love the feeling of the sun’s light on our skin. At last, they would have only one question remaining: “We have noted that there is a green god that you keep in front of and behind your houses, and we have seen how you are devoted to the care of this ornamental plant god. You call it Kentucky bluegrass, although it is neither blue nor from Kentucky. Here is what we are wondering: Why do you worship this species? Why do you value it over all the other plants?

I was sitting there, as I said, and had been for several watches, when I came to me that I was reading no longer. For some time I was hard put to say what I had been doing. When I tried, I could only think of certain odors and textures and colors that seemed to have no connection with anything discussed in the volume I held. At last I realized that instead of reading it, I had been observing it as a physical object. The red I recalled came from the ribbon sewn to the headband so that I might mark my place. The texture that tickled my fingers still was that of the paper in which the book was printed. The smell in my nostrils was old leather, still wearing the traces of birch oil. It was only then, when I saw the books themselves, when I began to understand their care.” His grip on my shoulder tightened. “We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with the thickest gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations—books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.” “We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too who leaves are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here—though I can no longer tell you where—no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear for an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other.

Looking around, I felt a mad desire to go shopping for pink flamingo and garden gnome lawn ornaments. I could do a midnight visit, plant one of each in every yard.

To grant [consolation and joy] to those who mourn in Zion—to give them an ornament (a garland or diadem) of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, the garment [expressive] of praise instead of a heavy, burdened, and failing spirit—that they may be called oaks of righteousness [lofty, strong, and magnificent, distinguished for uprightness, justice, and right standing with God], the planting of the Lord, that He

Just as the Mediterranean separated France from the country Algiers, so did the Mississippi separate New Orleans proper from Algiers Point. The neighborhood had a strange mix. It looked seedier and more laid-back all at the same time. Many artists lived on the peninsula, with greenery everywhere and the most beautiful and exotic plants. The French influence was heavy in Algiers, as if the air above the water had carried as much ambience as it could across to the little neighborhood. There were more dilapidated buildings in the community, but Jackson and Buddy passed homes with completely manicured properties, too, and wild ferns growing out of baskets on the porches, as if they were a part of the architecture. Many of the buildings had rich, ornamental detail, wood trim hand-carved by craftsmen and artisans years ago. The community almost had the look of an ailing beach town on some forgotten coast.

Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil.... Pretty soon all twenty of us - our class - would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I'd been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other's socks.... The poems I loved were in French, or translated from the Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek. I murmured their heartbreaking sylllables. I knew almost nothing of the diverse and energetic city I lived in. The poems whispered in my ear the password phrase, and I memorized it behind enemy lines: There is a world. There is another world. I knew already that I would go to Hollins College in Virginia; our headmistress sent all her problems there, to her alma mater. "For the English department," she told me.... But, "To smooth off her rough edges," she had told my parents. They repeated the phrase to me, vividly. I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag?

He will give every man a spirit-home according to his deserts: If he has been a good man, he will have a good home; if he has been a bad man, he will have a bad home. This I believe, and all my people believe the same. We did not know there were other people besides the Indian until about one hundred winters ago, when some men with white faces came to our country. They brought many things with them to trade for furs and skins. They brought tobacco, which was new to us. They brought guns with flint stones on them, which frightened our women and children. Our people could not talk with these white-faced men, but they used signs which all people understand. These men were called Frenchmen, and they called our people “Nez Perce,” because they wore rings in their noses for ornaments. Although very few of our people wear them now, we are still called by the same name. These French trappers said a great many things to our fathers, which have been planted in our hearts. Some were good for us, but some were bad. Our

We know nothing about how those earliest known surface glazes themselves were developed. Nevertheless, we can infer the methods of prehistoric invention by watching technologically “primitive” people today, such as the New Guineans with whom I work. I already mentioned their knowledge of hundreds of local plant and animal species and each species’ edibility, medical value, and other uses. New Guineans told me similarly about dozens of rock types in their environment and each type’s hardness, color, behavior when struck or flaked, and uses. All of that knowledge is acquired by observation and by trial and error. I see that process of “invention” going on whenever I take New Guineans to work with me in an area away from their homes. They constantly pick up unfamiliar things in the forest, tinker with them, and occasionally find them useful enough to bring home. I see the same process when I am abandoning a campsite, and local people come to scavenge what is left. They play with my discarded objects and try to figure out whether they might be useful in New Guinea society. Discarded tin cans are easy: they end up reused as containers. Other objects are tested for purposes very different from the one for which they were manufactured. How would that yellow number 2 pencil look as an ornament, inserted through a pierced ear-lobe or nasal septum? Is that piece of broken glass sufficiently sharp and strong to be useful as a knife? Eureka!

Natural beauty, for Darwin, was not just aesthetic; it always reflected function and adaptation at work. Orchids were not just ornamental, to be displayed in a garden or a bouquet; they were wonderful contrivances, examples of nature’s imagination, natural selection, at work. Flowers required no Creator, but were wholly intelligible as products of accident and selection, of tiny incremental changes extending over hundreds of millions of years. This, for Darwin, was the meaning of flowers, the meaning of all adaptations, plant and animal, the meaning of natural selection.

Can we get outside?" he asked Jasmine in a gasp. "Up ahead," she said between breaths. "There is a columned loggia that leads to the Courtyard of the Rose-Scented Footstools." Aladdin looked at her. "Just kidding," she said with a quick smile. "They don't really smell." The tiger bounded ahead as if he knew the plan. The carpet stayed behind them as if he was guarding the rear. Aladdin wasn't sure what a loggia was, but ahead there was a hall dotted with columns that opened up into a large courtyard with no ceiling overhead. There were lemon trees, sweet-scented myrtle, and pots of roses. More columns, ornamental and abstract, decorated the interior of the courtyard along with statues depicting ancient river gods. There were indeed footstools- carved into the shape of roses.

In Santa Fe her whole yard had been crowded with different-sized terra-cotta pots, out of which she grew everything from rosemary and lavender to ornamental pear and plum trees and even peppers, although they were not particularly popular with the bees. In Colorado she'd created a fertile oasis out of old gas cans and cut-off oil drums. Her neighbors had been skeptical to begin with but once her creepers grew up and her flowers draped down and her shrubs fluffed out, the junkyard ugly duckling was transformed into the proverbial backyard swan.

dam·i·an·a   n. a small shrub native to Mexico whose leaves are used in herbal medicine and in the production of a liqueur. It is reputed to possess aphrodisiac qualities.  Turnera diffusa, family Turneraceae.  American Spanish. Dam·i·et·ta   the eastern branch of the Nile delta. Arabic name DUMYAT.  a port at the mouth of this delta; pop. 113,000. Linked entries: DUMYAT da·min·o·zide   n. a growth retardant sprayed on vegetables and fruit, esp. apples, to enhance the quality of the crop. In the U.S., the application of daminozide is now restricted to ornamental plants due to the potential health risks of consuming the chemical.  Chem. formula: C6H12N2O3. dam·mar (also dam·ar)   n. resin obtained from any of a number of tropical and mainly Indo-Malaysian trees, used to make varnish.  The resin is obtained from trees in the families Araucariaceae (genus Agathis), Dipterocarpaceae (genera Hopea, Shorea, and Vatica), and Burseraceae (genus Canarium).  late 17th cent.: from Malay damar 'resin'. dam·mit   exclam. used to express anger and frustration.  mid 19th cent.: alteration of damn it. damn   v. [trans.] (in Christian belief) (of God) condemn (a person) to suffer eternal punishment in hell:

butterfly garden is comprised of purple coneflower, Black-eyed Susan, butterfly bush, phlox, milkweed, monarda—or bee balm, as I prefer to call it—lots of plants with luscious nectar that caterpillars love to eat and adult butterflies love to feed upon. I also have ornamental grasses scattered throughout to provide shade and places to hide. But butterflies and bees seem to love my purple coneflower more than anything. They are attracted by its color and stay for its nectar. As if on cue,

We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with thickset gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations—books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them. “We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too whose leaves are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here—though I can no longer tell you where—no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear for an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other.

well-nurtured plants . . . pillars. The royal interest of this psalm in conjunction with the reference to a palace might conjure an image of flourishing civic projects. The splendor of a palace and city was enhanced by ornamental gardens. The Assyrian king Sennacherib (c. 700 BC) boasted that he adorned the city of Nineveh with a “great park” containing all kinds of herbs and fruit trees, and that he allotted plots of land for the people to plant orchards. In addition, he developed an elaborate irrigation system to keep the plantings lush. Similarly, fine architecture was a credit to any monarch who experienced success in his reign. Sennacherib spoke of the elaborate portico of his palace with copper and cedar pillars to support the grand doors. Such pillars were sometimes carved in human shape. This psalm draws on such images to describe the blessing of offspring who flourish as the most important pride of any community (see notes on 127:1, 4–5).

On both weekdays and weekends, Boomers descend on hardware stores to fill trolleys with paints, rugs, lawn ornaments, plants, light-fixtures and other gee-gaws to improve their already palatial homes. They move like predatory marauders, ready to snatch those red-hot deals off the central aisle stands.

In the last decade and a half a revival of plant behavior research had brought countless new realizations to botany, more than forty years after an irresponsible best-selling book nearly snuffed out the field for good. The Secret Life of Plants, published in 1973, captured the public imagination on a global scale. Written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, the book was a mix of real science, flimsy experiments, and unscientific projection. In one chapter, Tompkins and Bird suggested that plants could feel and hear—and that they preferred Beethoven to rock and roll. In another, a former CIA agent named Cleve Backster hooked up a polygraph test to his houseplant and imagined the plant being set on fire. The polygraph needle went wild, which would mean the plant was experiencing a surge in electrical activity. In humans, a reading like that was believed to denote a surge of stress. The plant, according to Backster, was responding to his malevolent thoughts. The implication was that there existed not only a sort of plant consciousness but also plant mind-reading. The book was an immediate and meteoric success on the popular market, surprising for a book about plant science. Paramount put out a feature film about it. Stevie Wonder wrote the soundtrack. The first pressings of the album version were sent out scented with floral perfume. To its many astonished readers, the book offered a new way to view the plants all around them, which up until then had seemed ornamental, passive, more akin to the world of rocks than animals. It also aligned with the advent of New Age culture, which was ready to inhale stories about how plants were as alive as we are. People began talking to their houseplants, and leaving classical music playing for their ficus when they went out. But it was a beautiful collection of myths.

Oleander ranks in the top five ornamental plants that cause fatalities.

Monique teaches her daughters the names of the trees, birds, wildflowers, and ornamental plants. She wants them to pay attention to the natural world, which will always be a solace to them, no matter what happens.

there now sat a square package perhaps a cubit on a side, done up in a golden wrapping all spattered with ornamental sparks of brighter and darker gold. She went over to it, picked it up to test the weight: somewhat heavy. Arrhae shook the box, then smiled at herself. Nothing rattled. She wandered back into her chamber with it, pushed her clothes aside, and sat down on the couch. Carefully Arrhae unwrapped the paper without tearing it—the old habit of a household manager, not to waste anything that might be useful later—and set it aside, revealing a plain golden paperboard box inside. A seal held the closing-flap down. She slit the seal with one thumbnail, opened the box, and found inside it some white tissue spangled with more golden spots, all wrapped around something roughly spherical. Arrhae pushed the padding-tissue aside to reveal a smooth clear substance, a glassy dome. Reaching into the box, she brought out what revealed itself as a dish garden of clear glass: the bottom of it full of stripes of colored sand, and rooted in the sand, various small dry-climate plants, spiny or thick-leaved, one or two of them producing tiny, delicate, golden flowers. Attached to the upper dome, instead of a chip or tag, was a small, white, gold-edged printed card that said, FROM AN ADMIRER—WELCOME HOME. Arrhae

Trade and commerce and common sense and common decency prevailed, and men and women availed themselves of all opportunities. New roads were laid; office blocks shot up. And luxury flats stood on crumbling slums like shining false teeth on rotten gums. At the top of the building, whose ground floor is occupied by the restaurant, there is a secret garden. It was planted by the two women who share the garret, where the ceilings are slanted and dormer windows jut out. Outside the windows is a ledge, where the roof meets the exterior wall. The windows are large enough to climb through and it is possible to stand on the ledge. The woman called Tabitha discovered this. She is an intermittent smoker and the other woman, Precious, won’t allow her to smoke inside. Tabitha found that, along the ledge, there are steps and, if you climb the short flight, you come to a flat terrace, sheltered by the adjacent slanting roofs but exposed enough to trap the midday sun. Precious and Tabitha have filled the space with life. It began with a cheap chilli plant Precious picked up from the supermarket. The chillies did better than expected and Precious bought others, then the generic herbs of a kitchen garden: parsley, rosemary, chives. She bought a rose and ornamental grasses.

The coast of Austria-Hungary yielded what people called cappuzzo, a leafy cabbage. It was a two-thousand-year-old grandparent of modern broccoli and cauliflower, that was neither charismatic nor particularly delicious. But something about it called to Fairchild. The people of Austria-Hungary ate it with enthusiasm, and not because it was good, but because it was there. While the villagers called it cappuzzo, the rest of the world would call it kale. And among its greatest attributes would be how simple it is to grow, sprouting in just its second season of life, and with such dense and bulky leaves that in the biggest challenge of farming it seemed to be how to make it stop growing. "The ease with which it is grown and its apparent favor among the common people this plant is worthy a trial in the Southern States," Fairchild jotted. It was prophetic, perhaps, considering his suggestion became reality. Kale's first stint of popularity came around the turn of the century, thanks to its horticultural hack: it drew salt into its body, preventing the mineralization of soil. Its next break came from its ornamental elegance---bunches of white, purple, or pink leaves that would enliven a drab garden. And then for decades, kale kept a low profile, its biggest consumers restaurants and caterers who used the cheap, bushy leaves to decorate their salad bars. Kale's final stroke of luck came sometime in the 1990s when chemists discovered it had more iron than beef, and more calcium, iron, and vitamin K than almost anything else that sprouts from soil. That was enough for it to enter the big leagues of nutrition, which invited public relations campaigns, celebrity endorsements, and morning-show cooking segments. American chefs experimented with the leaves in stews and soups, and when baked, as a substitute for potato chips. Eventually, medical researchers began to use it to counter words like "obesity," "diabetes," and "cancer." One imagines kale, a lifetime spent unnoticed, waking up one day to find itself captain of the football team.

Every single year, at least one tree is cut down in your name. Here’s my personal request to you: If you own any private land at all, plant one tree on it this year. If you are renting a place with a yard, plant a tree in it and see if your landlord notices. If he does, insist to him that it was always there. Throw in a bit about how exceptional he is for caring about the environment to have put it there. If he takes the bait, go plant another one. Baffle some chicken wire at its base and string a cheesy bird house around its tiny trunk to make it look permanent, then move out and hope for the best... …There are more than one thousand successful tree species for you to choose from... You must choose with a clear head and open eyes. You are marrying this tree: choose a partner, not an ornament... …If you do own the land that it is planted on, create a savings account and put $5 in it every month, so that when your tree gets sick between ages twenty and thirty—and it will—you can have a tree doctor over to cure it, instead of just cutting it down. Each time you blow your account on tree surgery, put your head down and start over, knowing that your tree is doing the same... …While you're at it, would you carve Bill's name into your tree as well?...

Several weeks before he left Peking, Meyer visited a small village and noticed, in a house's doorway, a small bush with fruit as yellow as a fresh egg yolk. Meyer ignored a man who told him the plant was ornamental, its fruit not typically eaten but prized for its year-round production. The fruit looked like a mix between a mandarin and a citron (which later genetic testing would confirm). It was a lemon, but smaller and rounder---its flavor surprised him as both sweeter than a citron and tarter than an orange. And its price, twenty cents per fruit or ten dollars per tree, suggested that people with an abundance of other citrus valued it greatly. Meyer had little room in his baggage, but he used his double-edged bowie knife to take a cutting where the branches formed a V, the choice spot to secure its genetic material. That cutting made the voyage to Washington, and then the trip to an experiment station in Chico, California, where it propped up a new lemon industry grateful to receive a sweeter variety. The lemon became known as the Meyer lemon, and from it came lemon tarts, lemon pies, and millions of glasses of lemonade.

The recovery of biodiversity after major extinctions takes several million years. In the interval, the world is inhabited by a list of species more or less equivalent to ragweed and roaches.

Vasey’s Paradise was special. Above them, freshwater springs leapt out of the limestone and unraveled long, twisting ribbons. At a glance they could see the dominant species: Western redbud, scarlet monkeyflower, and “gobs” of poison ivy. Clear rivulets of water chattered and burbled from beneath this verdant tangle, licked with streamers of algae and moss and more beautifully arranged than any ornamental garden. Powell had looked at this spot with a geologist’s eyes, describing the sun-struck fountains as “a million brilliant gems,” but he named it after a botanist, George Vasey. Vasey never boated the Grand Canyon, nor saw the place that bore his name. Clover and Jotter were the first botanists to make a catalog of the plants there for Western science.

Wasn’t it indeed a time to plant a new society for the oldies? Take them out of their glass cabinets. They’re not only feel-good ornaments. Sad old hug machines. They aren’t the moth-balled walking-dead. Take them out of their pre-coffins. Cultivate everything that would add value to their lives. Believe in agency.

Such is the present state of things in this country, that we have just ground to hope that religion and learning, the useful and ornamental branches of science, will meet with encouragement, and that they will be extended to the remotest parts of the American empire. . . . Here we behold a country vast in extent, mild in its climate, exuberant in its soil, and favorable to the enjoyment of life. . . . Here may the Gospel be preached to the latest period of time; the arts and sciences be planted; the seeds of virtue, happiness, and glory be firmly rooted and grow up to full maturity.

As a rule, don’t store anything on top of your desk. Your desktop is a work surface, not a storage cupboard, so the rule of thumb is to store nothing on it. Pick a spot in your drawers and on your shelves for each item or category. As much as possible, the only things on your desk should be whatever you need right now for the project you are working on. Keep this image of a clear desktop in your mind when you start storing. People who do so usually finish with only a laptop and an ornament or potted plant on their desk. Designate a storage space even for things you use daily, such as a pen or memo pad. My clients are often surprised to find that it’s not inconvenient at all to store these things out of sight when not in use. Once they experience how a neat and tidy desk enables them to focus on their work, they quickly become addicted to that state.

A century after its introduction, Eucalyptus stelloleta, a tree planted worldwide for lumber and ornamental purposes, supports only one species in California but 48 species of insects in its Australian homeland according to D. Strong and colleagues.

Now we know that man is more than two million years old,' exlaimed Heyerdahl, 'it would be very strange if our ancestors lived like primitive food collectors for all that time until suddenly they started in the Nile valley, in Mesopotamia and even in the Indus valley, to build a civilization at peak level pretty much at the same time. And there's a question I ask that I never get an answer to. The tombs from the first kingdom of Sumer are full of beautiful ornaments and treasures made of gold, silver, platinum, and semi-precious stones -- things you don't find in Mesopotamia. All you find there is mud and water -- good for planting but not much else. How did they suddenly learn -- in that one generation just about -- where to go to find gold and all these other things? To do that they must have known the geography of wide areas, and that takes time. So there must have been something before.

Ergine (LSA) Ergine, or lysergic acid amide (LSA), is structurally similar to LSD with vaguely comparable effects. Users tend to find it more sedating, often nauseating, and generally less potent than LSD. However, at microdoses, it can boost mental clarity and focus while relieving anxiety and depression. It’s also naturally occurring and, while the compound itself is widely illegal, ergine-containing seeds are not. Morning glories and Hawaiian baby woodrose are among the best known plant sources, and both are legal to grow in the U.S. (except Arizona), the UK., and mainland Europe (except Italy). Common microdoses fall in the range of 5-15 morning glory seeds or 0.33-3 Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds. Usually, they’re chewed for about 20 minutes and held under the tongue to absorb the ergine sublingually. Mescaline Cacti are well known as some of the easiest plants to grow, practically taking care of themselves given the right conditions. And mescaline-containing cacti, such as peyote and San Pedro, are legal in most countries. Although peyote cultivation is restricted in the U.S. to members of the Native American Church (or Peyote Religion), San Pedro can freely be grown for ornamental purposes.

Bean mentions that the tree does not flower until 30 to 40 years of age. American references have stated 10 to 14 years. All authors, including this one, tend to pass along time-honored information without determining, first hand, the actual response in question.

As I grow wiser and more skeptical, I realize that almost everything in nomenclature comes full circle. The question remains whether I can outlast the taxonomists.

Native plants are a threat to an entire Western culture, and an entire industry built foremost on nature as ornamentation for human visual consumption. Native plants represent a gardening paradigm, that instead of focusing solely or primarily on the commercialization of our five senses, explores the deeper issues of why we garden, how we garden and who we garden for.

All too often the first step in the suburbanization of an area is to bulldoze the plant assemblages native to our neighborhoods and then to replace them with large manicured lawns bordered by a relatively few species of popular ornamentals from other continents.

For two days a scene from his previous life had hung at the outside edge of perception, giving him the impression that he was accompanied everywhere by one or two partly visible companions. They were tall and whitish—candle-like figures resembling the drawings of the insane—and whenever he turned his head they vanished immediately. At unexpected moments the scene would submerge him completely, and he would become aware that they were walking in some sort of sunken ornamental garden planted with flowers whose names he could not remember and filled with a smell of horsehair and mint which varied in intensity with the wind from beyond the walls. Across it floated the voices of his companions, engaged in some half-serious philosophical or religious dispute. His relationship to them, whilst not precisely sexual, could be described in only the most complex and emotional of terms, and his constant attempts to see them more clearly had given his head a slight sideways tilt, and lent to his expression an even more withdrawn quality than was usual.