Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants - Softcover

Richard Mabey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846680816 ISBN 13: 9781846680816

Publisher: Profile Books, 2012

Synopsis

Ever since the first human settlements 10,000 years ago, weeds have dogged our footsteps. They are there as the punishment of 'thorns and thistles' in Genesis and , two millennia later, as a symbol of Flanders Field. They are civilisations' familiars, invading farmland and building-sites, war-zones and flower-beds across the globe. Yet living so intimately with us, they have been a blessing too. Weeds were the first crops, the first medicines. Burdock was the inspiration for Velcro. Cow parsley has become the fashionable adornment of Spring weddings.

Weaving together the insights of botanists, gardeners, artists and poets with his own life-long fascination, Richard Mabey examines how we have tried to define them, explain their persistence, and draw moral lessons from them.

One persons weed is another's wild beauty.

About this title

Review:

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

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)

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 (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)

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)

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Profile Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1846680816
• ISBN 13: 9781846680816
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336