She is only coming to gloat over my bedraggled and flowerless borders and to sing the praises of her own detestably over-cultivated garden.

In those days Northern governesses of the meek sort used often to fare a little dismally among those high-spirited and not over-cultivated Southern girls.

She grew up in a hothouse, one of the three over-cultivated daughters of a businessman immersed in tending his millions and a mother who clung to her children for company.

How do you reassess or repackage a composer about whom virtually everything is known, who wrote no opera of note and whose copious output of keyboard sonatas, string quartets and classical symphonies seems over-cultivated for our sensation-hungry age?

There, in that great sloven continent, in high Alleghany pastures, in the sea-wide, sky-skirted prairie, still sleeps and murmurs and hides the great mother, long since driven away from the trim hedge-rows and over-cultivated garden of England.

Feisty females in the grand literary tradition possess ingenuity and wit as well as pluck; Ella offers little more than her own overcultivated rose garden.

The overcultivated, emotionally constrained New York of Edith Wharton and Henry James — who appears in the novel as a force for debilitating self-control — resounds in the morality tale of Theodore’s demise.