Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants - Hardcover

Richard Mabey

3.82

917 ratings by Goodreads

9781846680762: Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 184668076X ISBN 13: 9781846680762

Publisher: Profile Books, 2010

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Weeds survive, entombed in the soil, for centuries. They are as persistent and pervasive as myths. They ride out ice ages, agricultural revolutions, global wars. They mark the tracks of human movements across continents as indelibly as languages. Yet to humans they are the scourge of our gardens, saboteurs of our best-laid plans. They rob crops of nourishment, ruin the exquisite visions of garden designers, and make unpleasant and impenetrable hiding places for urban ne'er-do-wells.

Weeds can be destructive and troubling, but they can also be beautiful, and they are the prototypes of most of the plants that keep us alive. Humans have grappled with their paradox for thousands of years, and with characteristic verve and lyricism, Richard Mabey uncovers some of the deeper cultural reasons behind the attitudes we have to such a huge section of the plant world.

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Review:

This book will open your eyes to the significance, wonder and exasperation felt about weeds. I couldn't put the book down once I started reading. Mabey offers a diversity and richness of fact, fiction, philosophy and fun ... [he] opens our minds and hearts in unexpected ways to the fallacy of an implacable divide between people and nature ... a great read. (Professor Stephen Hopper, Director, Kew Gardens)

Richard Mabey's journey through the realm of weeds is witty, learned and original. It says as much about us as these maligned plants, and is a surprising tale. His delightful book will not make weeding any easier but it will make it an intellectual activity and thus a philosophical one. The writing is stunning, the argument undeniable. Some plants and most people have a problem which will never go away. (Ronald Blythe)

Mr Mabey is the kind of person you wish you had with you on every country walk, identifying, explaining, deducing, drawing on deep knowledge lightly worn. (Country Life)

A fascinating display of personal knowledge of the history of different species and their changing status in the minds of our ancestors. Excellent. (Daily Mail)

[Mabey] is the steward of a pastoral tradition in which highly personal responses to landscape are matched by expert environmental concerns; his ideas have become standard with no loss of urgency ... he deepens symbolic value by combining close attention to details with a more sweeping sense of things. In Weeds, Mabey has written a memorable hymn to the marginal. (Andrew Motion Guardian)

The nation's favourite nature writer. (Sunday Telegraph)

Mabey weaves social history, psychology, literature and art into his clear rendering of plant biology. Explanations of evolution sit alongside explorations of flower symbolism in Shakespeare. (Nature)

Told with delight in the "sheer opportunism" of weeds, and their right to do what all living things do - to grow, whenever and wherever possible. A treat. (Financial Times)

Enraptured, visionary, witty and erudite ... firmly in the Gilbert White tradition. Why, by the way, can English writers do this better than anybody else?

A fascinating read.

(Telegraph)

A witty, wise insight into the floral world and our capricious relationship with some of its more boisterous inhabitants. (BBC Countryfile)

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

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