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perennial
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  • The Black-Eyed Susan is a popular perennial plant.
    perennial = a flower that survives through at least two growing seasons
  • I had plans for a perennial shade garden.   (source)
    perennial = of plants that survive a long time
  • John and I had done all the work ourselves: raked the leaves and shredded them in the chipper, cut back the dead perennials and mulched the beds, shoveled compost onto the vegetable garden and tilled it, and dug up the dahlia bulbs and stored them in a bucket of sand in the basement.†   (source)
  • There are a few perennials.†   (source)
  • Through a narrow door at the back of her shop was that niche with a light green counter where stems had been snipped and roses dethorned, where even now one could find scattered across the floor the dried petals of ten perennials essential to the making of potions.†   (source)
  • Buds burst from brown branches, perennials forcing their way tentatively through the dark, claggy soil.†   (source)
  • Tulips could not be mixed with perennials.†   (source)
  • Plants that do this are called perennials because they come back year after year.†   (source)
  • Even today, only cottonwoods and Chinese elms-perennials with a cactus like in-difference to thirst-are commonly planted.†   (source)
  • The air had died in the cypresses in the courtyard, in the pale trappings of the bedrooms, in the dripping archways of the garden of perennials.†   (source)
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show 10 more with this conextual meaning
  • All through the house there were seed packets and Xeroxed pictures of perennials and biennials and alpines and annuals and roses in every color you could imagine.†   (source)
  • They spent the next few minutes wandering along the path while she pointed out the annuals she knew: black-eyed Susans, blazing stars, morning glories, and prairie asters, intermingled with perennials like forget-me-nots, Mexican hats, and Oriental poppies.†   (source)
  • I decided to invite her to inspect the more extensive garden behind the house, and she was plainly happy to follow me there, to walk among the perennials that I'd recently planted in what used to be a small croquet lawn, adjacent to the pool.†   (source)
  • The roses were done for, the perennials too.†   (source)
  • Prologue: Perennials for the Rock Garden   (source)
    perennials = flowers or other plant that survive all the seasons of the year; or that live for over two years
  • I'd already done some preliminary, surreptitious packing — my jewel box, my photographs, Perennials for the Rock Garden and now I did the rest.   (source)
  • I contented myself with books — Perennials for the Rock Garden, Desert Succulents for Northern Climes, and the like.   (source)
  • She tucked it into a brown envelope on which she'd written clippings, and hid the envelope between the pages of Perennials for the Rock Garden, where no one else would ever look.   (source)
  • But here at The Conifers you see tricycles and candy wrappers strewn outside; you see perennials and shrubs aplenty but all badly in need of sprucing and pruning; you see the domestic cars and economy imports; you see the subtle and varied indications of both decency and decline.†   (source)
  • Liv Crawford could speak to these elements and others, and then point out the work invested in the grounds, the mature and various species of tree and shrub, the well-chosen perennials and annuals and judicious use of ornamental stones, the scale and shape and proportion of the entire site a realty dream come true, so that all one need do is simply move right in.†   (source)
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  • Then menu changes weekly, but burgers and fries are maintained as a perennial favorite for the children.
  • Dorian Gray desired perennial youth.
    perennial = lasting forever
  • I arrived early, enough time for perennially strong appendiceal cancer survivor Lida to bring me up-to-date on everyone as I ate a grocery-store chocolate chip cookie while leaning against the dessert table.   (source)
    perennially = lasting a long time
  • Jean Louise looked at the three Perennial Hopefuls on her right.   (source)
    perennial = seemingly forever
  • The Perennial Hopefuls talked quietly among themselves: longest day I ever had ….   (source)
    perennial = lasting a long time
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show 4 more with this conextual meaning
  • Storing food was part of the perennial battle against winter.
  • Business is strong most years, but periods of weak sales are a perennial problem at unpredictable times.
  • The perennial adolescent riposte.   (source)
  • But Lenina and Henry had what they wanted … They were inside, here and now-safely inside with the fine weather, the perennially blue sky.   (source)
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  • For Princess Poliakova, a perennial victim of her own heart, it had been Oh, as in Oh, Alexander.†   (source)
  • Caroline, though, was perennially innocent, or stubborn, or maybe just plain dumb about this sort of thing.†   (source)
  • I grow grapes, a variety of vines, annual and perennial flowers, and, in one small area, tropical plants.†   (source)
  • I long for one, just one, rubbishy and insolently random and hard to get rid of and perennially yellow as the sun.†   (source)
  • And his hair, a blond mop, short on the sides and spiky on top, was always soaked through with so much gel that it looked perennially wet.†   (source)
  • I was the worst possible guardian for him—a black to watch over him in a society that considered blacks subhuman, a woman to watch over him in a society that considered women perennial children.†   (source)
  • They beat Carver and then played Christian Brothers, a school five times the size of Briarcrest and a perennial Tennessee football powerhouse.†   (source)
  • The perennial second-place also-ran.†   (source)
  • Lay readers and students generally like it, too, which explains why it has become a perennial strong seller.†   (source)
  • Even Mrs. Daugherty figured that my mother needed a perennial garden.†   (source)
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  • He slammed into one of the stanchions that holds up the monorail track-s perennial irritation to high-speed motorcyclists.†   (source)
  • The perennial crop failures in the Soviet Union were attributed to a highly centralized system run by distant bureaucrats.†   (source)
  • Two old men who had died of that perennial favorite, Long Illness.†   (source)
  • There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha.†   (source)
  • But it is perennially short of money, and like most parts of the United Nations it is infamously, inevitably, tangled in bureaucracy.†   (source)
  • But Luma faced the perennial struggle of fortifying the ranks of each team with newcomers, few of whom had ever played organized soccer, and finding a way to get all of her players—rookies and veterans—to play together as a team.†   (source)
  • Gray had heard Uncle Pros tell the story many times, but it had a perennial charm.†   (source)
  • For humans, the name soon progressed from exceedingly rare to a perennial top five choir e. Notice anything?†   (source)
  • This perennial thorn in NATO's southern flank had flared up a few weeks earlier when a Greek student had run over a Turkish child with his car and been killed by a gang minutes later.†   (source)
  • Needle Nelson, perennially sleepy, dozed in his saddle.†   (source)
  • There's the perennial threat of virus of course.†   (source)
  • First is the American Hop Museum, which bills itself as "the nation's only hop museum dedicated to showcasing the history of the obscure perennial vine bearing the botanical name Humulus lupulus."†   (source)
  • He'd chosen a crowd pleaser on boozy nights, that perennial jukebox favorite "American Pie."†   (source)
  • Its fragile economy, a life of splendor based on the perennial mortgaging of the next year's crop, was in his hands alone.†   (source)
  • He accepted the ironic smiles of the owner of the house, Blanca's grimaces, and the perennial distraction of Clara, who, even after a year, was still asking him his name.†   (source)
  • This was a calamity he had not foreseen, and he wanted to bust his roommates' heads open with his fists or pick them up, each in turn, by the seats of their pants and the scruffs of their necks and pitch them out once and for all into the dank, rubbery perennial weeds growing between his rusty soupcan urinal with nail holes in the bottom and the knotty-pine squadron latrine that stood like a beach locker not far away.†   (source)
  • Only cactuses had perennial appeal.†   (source)
  • The Browns were perennial bottom-dwellers of the American League. hook, amigo, Hornsby hired you, I didn't.†   (source)
  • According to Mavis, the space jocks were perennially horny.†   (source)
  • The cover they were now discussing was tied to a piece Lucy had commissioned on lounge lizards and featured a grinning photograph of a perennial rock star whose wrinkles had already been contractually removed by computer.†   (source)
  • Obie, the perennial straight man, called out.†   (source)
  • Language is a growing thing, like a perennial garden, always throwing off new shoots, sometimes even new hybrids, needing constant thinning and pruning to preserve its vitality and beauty.†   (source)
  • There was the head and brow, its mass like a forged bell, the thousand tiny pocks in his swarthy cheeks, his thick moustache, unvain and wild, the full, almost tortured lips, perennially split in the middle like he'd been punched or roughed up a little.†   (source)
  • The first performer is Shapiro, who at a banquet is attempting to propose once more his perennially blackballed friend for membership.†   (source)
  • Followed by an elderly man who had died of that perennial bridesmaid, Short Illness.†   (source)
  • You perennially disappoint someone like me.†   (source)
  • Or a solace, maybe, an easing of some perennial clutch or grab, some taunt of malehood.†   (source)
  • These examples represent only the tip of the iceberg for the perennially abused Shrew: its plot seems to be permanently available to be moved in time and space, adapted, altered, updated, set to music, reimagined in myriad ways.†   (source)
  • I was a little late because Mrs. Mason had loaded me down with three hostas and five tall ferns "for your mother's perennial garden."†   (source)
  • Furnished with couches left behind by previous generations of Culver Creek students, the TV room had the musty air of dust and mildew—and, perhaps for that reason, was almost perennially unoccupied.†   (source)
  • The noise was the same, continuous, reassuring: human intentions (talking, traveling, eating) perennially renewing themselves whether I happened to sleep or wake, feel brisk or lazy.†   (source)
  • What it all added up to was that things around the Clark farm, according to Harold, were perennially at the brink of disintegration, while public opinion had it that really Harold was a better manager, and more prosperous, than anyone.†   (source)
  • K-9 was in sixth grade when I was in seventh, and she was by far the best-looking Katherine to date with her cute chin and the dimples in her cheeks, and her skin perennially tan, not unlike you, and she thought that dating an older man might be good for her social status, but she was wrong.†   (source)
  • In one of his books, Lemarchand quotes a German duke, who described the landscape of the colony Ruanda-Urundi in 1910 this way: "A hilly country, thickly populated, full of beautiful scenery, and possessing a climate incomparably fresh and healthy; a land of great fertility, with watercourses which might be termed perennial streams; a land which offers the brightest of prospects to the white settlers."†   (source)
  • Instead of the Heidi I'd gotten used to seeing, clad in sweats and a ponytail, dark circles perennially under her eyes, this was a different woman entirely.†   (source)
  • She could just go on like this, like a woman from old-fashioned times, a maiden aunt, some aging perennial girl who never leaves home.†   (source)
  • Another thought is that he has simply gone mad, or perhaps suffers a perennial state of upper-middle-class drunkenness, and his project is one of escape, to free himself from the realities of his fallen station.†   (source)
  • …would see him wrapped in an emperor's cape with his arms raised to hush the crowds that had been trucked in to acclaim him, his august mustache trembling with vanity as he inaugurated the monument to the Four Swords, from whose heights an eternal torch would illuminate the nation's destiny—except that, owing to an error by the foreign technicians, no flame would ever rise there, only a thick cloud of kitchen smoke that floated in the sky like a perennial storm from some other climate.†   (source)
  • And since Colin had, not too long before, been dumped by Katherine XVIII, Colin asked Marie out on a date, because Marie, a perennially tan Italian beauty who would have won Homecoming Queen if the Kalman School did that kind of thing, was the hottest girl he had ever, or would ever, come across.†   (source)
  • They rummaged desks, pried lockers open, sifted through books on a perennial search for loot— money, pot, books, watches, clothing—anything.†   (source)
  • He was a tall florid guy, Jack Marshall, a Broadway press agent who was on the perennial edge of dropping dead.†   (source)
  • The old man on the stoop across the street who spreads his handkerchief dainty on the top step and then sits and fills his pipe with cigarette tobacco and the shreddings of a crumbled DeNobili cigar, the perennial guinea stinker, and whatever else he can find that doesn't belong in a pipe.†   (source)
  • Yet his epistolary style, Sophie had observed, though workable and certainly not illiterate, fell often into clumsy, semi-opaque labyrinthine periods; it had the prosy, crippled rhythms of a man who was Army-educated, a perennial adjutant.†   (source)
  • It may be easily assumed, given my perennially renewed, pathetic hope for sexual fulfillment as already set down in this chronicle, that I needed no further enticement.†   (source)
  • So even now with the cloud of fear around her, while he taunts her and abuses her—even now her pleasure is not mere mild enjoyment but the perennially re-created bliss, and chill waves shiver down her back as she sucks and sucks and sucks.†   (source)
  • The perennial agony of man, self-torturing, deluded, tangled in the net of his own tenuous delirium, frustrated, yet having within himself, undiscovered, absolutely unutilized, the secret of release: this too he regards—and is.†   (source)
  • When they took Talland House father and mother gave us—me at any rate—what has been perennial, invaluable.†   (source)
  • For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet.†   (source)
  • A girl in the flower store kept a record in a special file of all the orders that came in for a cop's funeral, and then Tony just ran through the file after the funeral and checked the names by his master list of perennially bereaved friends and if your name was on the master list it had sure-God better be in the file for Murphy's funeral, and I don't mean any bunch of sweet peas, either.†   (source)
  • She postulated the elapsed years during which no honeymoon nor any change had taken place, out of which the (now) five faces looked with a sort of lifeless and perennial bloom like painted portraits hung in a vacuum, each taken at its forewarned peak and smoothed of all thought and experience, the originals of which had lived and died so long ago that their joys and griefs must now be forgotten even by the very boards on which they had strutted and postured and laughed and wept.†   (source)
  • …from the world—the woman who had quitted home and kin on a flood of tears and in a shadowy miasmic region something like the bitter purlieus of Styx had produced two children and then rose like the swamp-hatched butterfly, unimpeded by weight of stomach and all the heavy organs of suffering and experience, into a perennial bright vacuum of arrested sun—and the young girl dreaming, not living, in her complete detachment and imperviousness to actuality almost like physical deafness.†   (source)
  • And further up the street was Aunt Minna's house, where she lived solitary with her perennial parrot and her perennial Italian manservant.†   (source)
  • Also, I continued, looking down at the page again, it is becoming evident that women, like men, have other interests besides the perennial interests of domesticity.†   (source)
  • …least hoped he would not) and hence no man had a father, no one personal Porto Rico or Haiti, but all mother faces which ever bred swooping down at those almost calculable moments out of some obscure ancient general affronting and outraging which the actual living articulate meat had not even suffered but merely inherited; all boy flesh that walked and breathed stemming from that one ambiguous eluded dark fatherhead and so brothered perennial and ubiquitous everywhere under the sun—†   (source)
  • …two raised glasses of scuppernong claret or bought champagne; —music, the nightly repetitive last waltz as the days passed and the company waited to move, the brave trivial glitter against a black night not catastrophic but merely background, the perennial last scented spring of youth; and Judith not there and Henry the romantic not there and Bon the fatalist, hidden somewhere, the watcher and the watched: and the recurrent flower-laden dawns of that April and May and June filled with…†   (source)
  • Conseil asked me with his perennial good manners.†   (source)
  • Doorsill there was none, but a perennial passage for the hens under the door board.†   (source)
  • Danger, however great, held a perennial attraction for his aggressive nature.†   (source)
  • The mill still worked on, food being a perennial necessity; the abbey had perished, creeds being transient.†   (source)
  • It was bare of flowers because the perennial plants had been cut down for their winter rest, but there were tall shrubs and low ones which grew together at the back of the bed, and as the robin hopped about under them she saw him hop over a small pile of freshly turned up earth.†   (source)
  • Huckleberry was always dressed in the cast-off clothes of full-grown men, and they were in perennial bloom and fluttering with rags.†   (source)
  • RECLINING ON HIS BALCONY, Hans Castorp identified a plant that had started to flourish in a great many places now that the astronomical summer had begun and the days were growing shorter again: columbine, or aquilegia, from the family Ranunculaceae, a long-stemmed herbaceous perennial, with blue and violet, sometimes almost reddish-brown flowers and flat, spreading, weedlike foliage.†   (source)
  • Save among a few of the tough-minded and perennially suspicious, he had the power of arousing a fascinated and uncritical love.†   (source)
  • And it chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly toward the mystic and the transcendental, re-acted and shed a strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members.†   (source)
  • Perhaps it was because his experience of life elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school picnics, petty economies, wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life, and the inescapable odors of cooking, that he found this existence so alluring, these smartly clad men and women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple orchards that bloomed perennially under the limelight.†   (source)
  • His father was the kind of man who delights in a charming woman: who quotes her, stimulates her, and keeps her perennially charming.†   (source)
  • For when I view them in turn, whether it be our chief hostess herself, whose good heart, whose too good heart, has become a byword with all who know her, or her sister, who seems to be gifted with perennial youth and whose singing must have been a surprise and a revelation to us all tonight, or, last but not least, when I consider our youngest hostess, talented, cheerful, hard-working and the best of nieces, I confess, Ladies and Gentlemen, that I do not know to which of them I should…†   (source)
  • The door is opened by the perennial Judy, who, having surveyed them from top to toe with no particular favour, but indeed with a malignant sneer, leaves them standing there while she consults the oracle as to their admission.†   (source)
  • Lord Decimus had a reminiscence about a pear-tree formerly growing in a garden near the back of his dame's house at Eton, upon which pear-tree the only joke of his life perennially bloomed.†   (source)
  • His brown velvet jacket had become perennial; his hands had fixed themselves in his pockets; he shambled and stumbled and shuffled in a manner that denoted great physical helplessness.†   (source)
  • The game of prisoner's base, which not so long ago seemed to enjoy a perennial vitality in front of the worn-out stocks, may, so far as I can say, be entirely unknown to the rising generation of schoolboys there.†   (source)
  • Although the sight of that magnificent round of beef, and the silver tankard suggestive of real British home-brewed ale and porter, which perennially greet the eyes of the traveller returning from foreign parts who enters the coffee-room of the George, are so invigorating and delightful that a man entering such a comfortable snug homely English inn might well like to stop some days there, yet Dobbin began to talk about a post-chaise instantly, and was no sooner at Southampton than he…†   (source)
  • Adam walked round by the rick-yard, at present empty of ricks, to the little wooden gate leading into the garden—once the well-tended kitchen-garden of a manor-house; now, but for the handsome brick wall with stone coping that ran along one side of it, a true farmhouse garden, with hardy perennial flowers, unpruned fruit-trees, and kitchen vegetables growing together in careless, half-neglected abundance.†   (source)
  • But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens.†   (source)
  • …a wonderful small cottage in a street leading from the Fulham Road—one of those streets which have the finest romantic names—(this was called St. Adelaide Villas, Anna-Maria Road West), where the houses look like baby-houses; where the people, looking out of the first-floor windows, must infallibly, as you think, sit with their feet in the parlours; where the shrubs in the little gardens in front bloom with a perennial display of little children's pinafores, little red socks, caps, &c.†   (source)
  • Yes, for replenished with the meat and wine of the word, to the faithful man of God, this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing stronghold—a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well of water within the walls.†   (source)
  • Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.†   (source)
  • His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth.†   (source)
  • It is almost identical with that, for in the growing days of June, when the rills are dry, the grass-blades are their channels, and from year to year the herds drink at this perennial green stream, and the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply.†   (source)
  • Yet I rarely failed to find, even in midwinter, some warm and springly swamp where the grass and the skunk-cabbage still put forth with perennial verdure, and some hardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring.†   (source)
  • It is a clear and deep green well, half a mile long and a mile and three quarters in circumference, and contains about sixty-one and a half acres; a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds and evaporation.†   (source)
  • Almost the same johnswort springs from the same perennial root in this pasture, and even I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and one of the results of my presence and influence is seen in these bean leaves, corn blades, and potato vines.†   (source)
  • Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction.†   (source)
  • …snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants.†   (source)
  • It is perennially young, and I may stand and see a swallow dip apparently to pick an insect from its surface as of yore.†   (source)
  • (The visual possibilities of this scenario have made the Judgment a perennial favorite of painters since the seventh century B.C.) Later elaborations add that each goddess offered the prince her favor in her sphere of influence: Hera promised royal power, Athena military greatness, and Aphrodite, naturally, the most beautiful woman alive.†   (source)
  • Exhale them perennial sweet death, years, centuries hence.†   (source)
  • A region where grey twilight ever descends, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her dusk, scattering a perennial dew of stars.†   (source)
  • Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, And thought of him I love.†   (source)
  • Give me exhaustless, make me a fountain, That I exhale love from me wherever I go like a moist perennial dew, For the ashes of all dead soldiers South or North.†   (source)
  • For Him I Sing For him I sing, I raise the present on the past, (As some perennial tree out of its roots, the present on the past,) With time and space I him dilate and fuse the immortal laws, To make himself by them the law unto himself.†   (source)
  • America Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old, Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love, A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother, Chair'd in the adamant of Time.†   (source)
  • You untold life of me, And all you venerable and innocent joys, Perennial hardy life of me with joys 'mid rain and many a summer sun, And the white snows and night and the wild winds; O the great patient rugged joys, my soul's strong joys unreck'd by man, (For know I bear the soul befitting me, I too have consciousness, identity, And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth,) Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine, Our time, our term has come.†   (source)
  • Scented Herbage of My Breast Scented herbage of my breast, Leaves from you I glean, I write, to be perused best afterwards, Tomb-leaves, body-leaves growing up above me above death, Perennial roots, tall leaves, O the winter shall not freeze you delicate leaves, Every year shall you bloom again, out from where you retired you shall emerge again; O I do not know whether many passing by will discover you or inhale your faint odor, but I believe a few will; O slender leaves!†   (source)
  • [1] And herein too lie its perennial freshness of interest, and the actuality which makes it contemporaneous with every successive generation.†   (source)
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