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 long as the ground retains a few remnants of the vernal rains, this rude vegetation does not lack a certain charm, when the pyramids of the oyster-plant and the slender branches of the cotton-thistle rise above the wide carpet formed by the yellow-flowered centaury's saffron heads; but let the droughts of summer come and we see but a desolate waste, which the flame of a match would set ablaze from one end to the other.

Such is, or rather was, when I took possession of it, the Eden of bliss where I mean to live henceforth alone with the insect.

Forty years of desperate struggle have won it for me.
Eden, I said; and, from the point of view that interests me, the expression is not out of place.