The Life of Jean Henri Fabre 



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. The three- 

 pronged fork is the only implement of husbandry 

 that can penetrate such a soil as this; 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 plunder, I am compelled to rein- 

 state them in the ground whence they were driven 

 by the fork. 



What abounds without my mediation is the in- 

 vaders 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 ex- 

 ecrable weed which three years of stubborn war- 

 fare 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 

 cottage-thistle, whose straight and solitary stalk 

 soars to a height of three to six feet and ends in 

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