p passes there in spring,
when it has chanced to rain and a little grass shoots up.

My harmas, however, because of its modicum of red earth swamped by a
huge mass of stones, has received a rough first attempt at cultivation:
I am told that vines once grew here. And, in fact, when we dig the
ground before planting a few trees, we turn up, here and there, remains
of the precious stock, half carbonized by time. The three pronged fork,
therefore, the only implement of husbandry that can penetrate such
a soil as this, has entered here; and I am sorry, for the primitive
vegetation has disappeared. No more thyme, no more lavender, no more
clumps of kermes oak, the dwarf oak that forms forests across which we
step by lengthening our stride a little. As these plants, especially the
first two, might be of use to me by offering the Bees and Wasps a spoil
to forage, I am compelled to reinstate them in the ground whence they
were driven by the fork.

What abounds without my mediation is the invaders of any soil that is
first dug up and then left for a long time to its own resources. We
have, in the first rank, the couch grass, that execrable weed which
three years of stubborn warfare have not succeeded in exterminating.
Next, in respect of number, come the centauries, grim looking one
and all, bristling with prickles or starry halberds. They are the
yellow-flowered centaury, the mountain centaury, the star thistle and
the rough centaury: the first predominates. Here and there, amid their
inextricable confusion, stands, like a chandelier with spreading, orange
flowers for lights, the fierce Spanish oyster plant, whose spikes are
strong as nails. Above it, towers the Illyrian cotton thistle, whose
straight and solitary stalk soars to a height of three to six feet and
ends in large pink tufts. Its armor hardly yields before that of the
oyster plant. Nor must we forget the lesser thistle tribe, with first
of all, the prickly or 'cruel' thistle, which is so well armed that the
plant collector knows not where to grasp it; next, the spear thistle,
with its ample foliage, ending each of its veins with a spear head;
lastly, the black knapweed, which gathers itself into a spiky knot.
In among these, in long lines armed with hooks, the shoots of the blue
dewberry creep along the ground. To visit the prickly thicket when the
Wasp goes foraging, you must wear boots that come to mid-leg or else
resign yourself to a smarting in the calves. As lo