The lush style of Boyagoda's prose suits the novel's background of glittering paddy fields, verging at times on the baroque: one lovely list of shipping goods unfurls over 24 lines.
But while his bowling was lovely on the eye, his batting and fielding verged on the hapless – and he became used to his attempts being accompanied by ironic, though affectionate, applause.
In most intensively-managed European farming systems, the uncultivated elements present are linear features in the landscape, typically field margins, verges and watercourses.
Voles depend on rough grassland, so the unstoppable drive towards increased agricultural productivity, and the mania for tidying up fields and verges, is bad news for these little rodents, which are the kestrels' staple food.
The determinants of local species richness of diurnal Lepidoptera were studied in 68 agricultural landscapes in five geographic regions by sampling field margins, road verges, forest edges and patches of semi-natural grassland.
Conservation of the Cabrera vole in agricultural landscapes would require the maintenance of a network of tall and dense herbaceous patches, which could possibly be established along field margins, road verges, and ditches, and supported by agri-environment subsidy schemes.
At each site, (i) necropsy and intestine examination was undertaken on a sample of shot foxes (total number of foxes, 222), and (ii) fox faeces were collected in the field along road verges, and scored for degradation status (total number of faeces, 625).
"It's a field on the verge of an explosion," Carr says.
In materials science, advances in data analysis have placed the field on the verge of a revolution in how researchers conduct their work, analyze properties and trends in their data, and even discover new materials [17].
Selingo suggests a field on the verge of transformation, or at least modification, by MOOCs, hybrid physical/online courses, alternate certifications, and the generally fast-changing world of the young 21st century.
The effect of organic farming was even more pronounced on the flowering stage of high value bee plants, with 10-fold higher mean density of flowering plants in organic fields than in conventional fields and 1.9-fold higher in road verges bordering organic fields than in those bordering conventional fields.
