Word: flora
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...looked like a morality play, not a criminal trial. The sobbing 22-year-old defendant resembled Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, who, as Defense Attorney Flora Stuart reminded the jury, "had to wear the letter A and bear the shame and humiliation." This trial, however, took place last week in Bowling Green, Ky., and the A stood not for adultery but for abortion. Under an obscure state statute that allows only licensed physicians to perform abortions after the first trimester, Maria Pitchford was prosecuted for performing an abortion on herself during the 24th week of pregnancy. The penalty...
...accounts of the journey: trekking in sun, rain, wind and snow; sleeping night after night in a leaky one-man tent; existing on a crude, monotonous diet; dealing with reluctant porters; avoiding the snarling village mastiffs; living with the long silences and terse exchanges on the trail; and the flora, fauna and overwhelming vistas of peaks and valleys at the top of the world. There are frequent outcroppings of autobiography as Matthiessen, scion of a wealthy New York family, graduate of Hotchkiss and Yale and a founder in the 1950s of the Paris Review, writes with painful openness...
...Venice, a profusion of flora, fauna and visual metaphors...
...with fauna, so with flora. Dried leaves, cacti, moss, shrubs, tree trunks: the vegetable kingdom was there in quantity. Usually these pieces were mock-scientific-prolix classifications of fruit stains or upside-down plants at the Dutch pavilion, or, at the French, Roy Adzak's archaeological pastiche of fruit and vegetables embedded in plaster. In the Finnish pavilion, a sculptor named Olavi Lanu set forth a whole environment called Life in the Finnish Forest-blurred human figures made of earth, live moss, birch bark and other organic material. Granted that these quaint vegetative trolls would have looked better...
...South America, the Galápagos Islands are a fabled natural wonderland-of giant tortoises, dragonlike iguanas and birds so fearless that they ignore the approach of a human. Old Spanish explorers called them Las Islas Encantadas (the bewitched or enchanted islands). It was here, among the exotic flora and fauna of the isolated islands, notably their startlingly varied finches, that the young Charles Darwin found the key evidence for his theory of evolution. Yet these unique biological enclaves, long despoiled by pirates and passing sailors, are still under attack. Thousands of peering, prodding, picture-taking tourists now visit...