The whole thing corresponded roughly to his idea of a submarine forest: the plants, at once so large and so frail, seemed to need water to support them, and he wondered that they could hang in the air.

They taught farmers to bury the frail European plants in the sandy soil during the frigid northern Chinese winters and to dig them out in spring.

I landed squarely enough, but skidded on, my hands and feet unable to find anchorage in the frail plants, tearing those out by their roots in thick wet pads as I went.

Amid her lamentations we found out how this frail old plant had lived where the whole great forest had fallen.

Unlike the world where frail plants are destined to be die because the idea of giving them away violates the order of some system, the world of barter and cyberbarter is all glorious disorder and generous chaos.

The gentleness in him was a frail plant soon to be hidden and stifled, by the thick growth of other more natural emotions.

Happiness and content are frail plants which can only flourish under fair conditions if at all.

Pastoral metaphors and roses proliferate in his work, as does an image born of his twin obsessions - with the earth and with the human duty to cultivate - of a man tending a frail and isolated plant in an inhospitable place.

An effort to grow an asparagus fern - the frail plant that grows after the asparagus is finished - has just begun.

Democracy and the rule of law are frail plants beyond the West; globalisation, intensifying the gap between rich and poor, is making weak political regimes in less developed countries readier to resort to oppression and torture to stay in power.