1653, William Basse, “Clio, or The First Muse; in 9 Eglogues in Honor of 9 Vertues. As It was in His Dayes Intended. [Munday. Laurinella. Eglogue. Of True and Chast Love.]”, in J[ohn] P[ayne] C[ollier], editor, The Pastorals and Other Workes of William Basse.[…] (Miscellaneous Tracts, Temp. Eliz. & Jac. I), [London: s.n.], published 1870, →OCLC, page 14:
O Laurinella! little doſt thou wot How fraile a flower thou doſt ſo highly prize: Beauty's the flower, but love the flower-pot That muſt preſerve it, els it quickly dyes.
I hope you will think kindly of my whitened bones, and never have anything more to do with Greek writing on flower-pots, sir, if I may make so bold as to say so.
Three chairs of the steamer type, all maimed, comprised the furniture of this roof-garden, with (by way of local color) on one of the copings a row of four red clay flower-pots filled with sun-baked dust from which gnarled and rusty stalks thrust themselves up like withered elfin limbs.
2002 April 19, Suzanne Hamlin, “FAVORITES; One Terra-Cotta Pot. Add Lateral Thinking”, in The New York Times[1]:
As a multifaceted kitchen enabler, nothing can quite supplant the gorgeous, timeless, ever-available, often dirt-cheap terra-cotta flowerpot.
2005 April 8, Brian Greene, “One Hundred Years of Uncertainty”, in The New York Times[2]:
The reason we have for so long been unaware that the universe evolves probabilistically is that for the relatively large, everyday objects we typically encounter -- baseballs, flowerpots, the Moon -- quantum mechanics shows that the probabilities become highly skewed, hugely favoring one outcome and effectively suppressing all others.
