In one Staten Island firehouse, failed little squares of duct tape clung in a gray row on the firehouse wall, their corners turned up toward the sky, like some sort of sickly, sticky plant.

But the centaur leaped clear, and the fangs closed instead on a sickly rose plant.

Esk saw a fallen headstone, and realized that these were sunken graves, with the sickly plants crowding them.

As if by magic the sickly plants began to revive, and within four days the yellow leaves were returning to their natural color.

A small garden sprinkled over with a scattered eruption of sickly plants separated each of these houses from the street, and was traversed by a narrow pathway, yellowish in colour, and consisting apparently of a mixture of clay and of gravel.

I wandered along London streets, comparing the noise and bustle with the deep solitudes of Ceylon, and I felt like the sickly plants in a London parterre.

I don't know if it was the oil, or the attention I began giving my sickly plants - pulling the weeds, cultivating the soil a bit to loosen up those clods, dosing it with a bit of seaweed fertilizer - but they have begun to perk up and put out new leaves.

They provide food for predators whose presence reduces the likelihood of any one pest developing into epidemic proportions, and they eliminate weak and sickly plants.

Here he set always the most interesting additions to his collection, and especially weak and sickly plants, for there was a glass door in his study wall through which he could see into this hothouse, so that the weak and sickly plants could encounter no crisis without his immediate knowledge and his tender care.

But it's just as good at animating the insects on a crawling sickly plant in Bob's office, where Bob secretly pines for his frumpy, cheerless hygienist.