Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants - Hardcover

Mabey, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0062065459 ISBN 13: 9780062065452

Publisher: Ecco Press, 2011

Synopsis

"[A] witty and beguiling meditation on weeds and their wily ways....You will never look at a weed, or flourish a garden fork, in the same way again."
--Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder

"In this fascinating, richly detailed book, Richard Mabey gives weeds their full due."
--Carl Zimmer, author of Evolution

Richard Mabey, Great Britain's Britain's "greatest living nature writer" (London Times), has written a stirring and passionate defense of nature's most unloved plants. Weeds is a fascinating, eye-opening, and vastly entertaining appreciation of the natural world's unappreciated wildflowers that will appeal to fans of David Attenborough, Robert Sullivan's Rats, Amy Stewart's Wicked Plants, and to armchair gardeners, horticulturists, green-thumbs, all those who stop to smell the flowers.

About this title

Review:

Enraptured, visionary, witty and erudite. . . . As Mabey points out, these plants. . . deserve a measure of respect. --Sunday Telegraph

Mabey writes about weeds with the confident affection of someone discussing old friends. . . . [A] celebration of the vexed coupling between mankind and plantlife. --The Observer

Refreshing, droll, politically alert, occasionally self-mocking, he has the enviable ability both to write historical overview and also to slip into the woods like a dryad, bringing us back to the trees themselves, their colours and lights and textures. --The Guardian

Mabey has the heart of a Romantic poet, kept in order by a botanist s learning and an archivist s diligence. --The Observer

Mabey s writing is as brilliant in its minutely observed detail as in its broad sweeps. --Financial Times

Mabey is to botany what Elizabeth David is to cookery - a lyrical inspirer of enthusiasm and interest. --Daily Mail (London)

A profound and sympathetic meditation on weeds. . . . Illuminating. . . . Mabey is as well versed in the literature of weeds as in the botany, richly weaving his own observations with the words of others: Shakespeare on nettles; Ruskin on poppies; Thoreau on brambles. --Sunday Times (London)

Like Seamus Heaney, [he] is one of those writers whose language is pressed very close to the world. --Scotland on Sunday

Richard Mabey is a man for all seasons... and every kind of landscape. --Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate of the UK

Mabey [is] the eminence grise of contemporary nature writing. . . . In "Weeds", he has written a memorable hymn to the marginal. --The Guardian

Book Description:

A lively and lyrical cultural history of plants in the wrong place by one of Britain's best and most admired nature writers

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0062065459
• ISBN 13: 9780062065452
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336