Culture and Lifestyle
Inside a Terrarium, It’s Always Gardening Season
As winter closes in, there’s at least one place where plants will still grow: a terrarium. Here’s how to get started on yours.
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Inside each glass orb, Aki Murase has curated a miniature manicured landscape.
CNN.COM
Kyoto 'gardener' builds space-like terrariums
terrarium
/tɛˈrɛːrɪəm/
noun
- a vivarium for smaller land animals, especially reptiles, amphibians, or terrestrial invertebrates, typically in the form of a glass-fronted case.
- a sealed transparent globe or similar container in which plants are grown.
VERB
[NO OBJECT]Britishinformal
- Spend time in ineffectual activity.‘we can't faff around forever’
NOUN
Britishinformal
- A great deal of ineffectual activity.‘there was the usual faff of getting back to the plane’
Origin
Late 18th century (originally dialect in the sense ‘blow in puffs’, describing the wind): imitative. The current sense may have been influenced by dialect faffle ‘stammer, stutter’, later ‘flap in the wind’, which came to mean ‘fuss, dither’ at about the same time as faff (late 19th century).
The laurels that are being referred to when someone is said to 'rest on his laurels' are the aromatically scented Laurus Nobilis trees or, more specifically, their leaves. The trees are known colloquially as Sweet Bay and are commonly grown as culinary or ornamental plants.
The origins of the phrase lie in ancient Greece, where laurel wreaths were symbols of victory and status. Of course, ancient Greece is where history and mythology were frequently mixed, so we need to tread carefully. The pre-Christian Greeks associated their god Apollo with laurel - that much is historical fact, as this image of Apollo wearing a laurel wreath on a 2nd century BC coin indicates. The reason for that association takes us into the myth of Apollo's love for the nymph Daphne, who turned into a Bay tree just as Apollo approached her (anything could happen if you were a Greek god). Undeterred, Apollo embraced the tree, cut off a branch to wear as a wreath and declared the plant sacred. Their belief in the myth caused the Greeks to present laurel wreaths to winners in the Pythian Games, which were held at Delphi in honour of Apollo every four years from the 6th century BC.
