Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination - Softcover

Richard Mabey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1861979584 ISBN 13: 9781861979582

Publisher: Profile Books, 2016

Synopsis

In The Cabaret of Plants, Mabey explores the plant species which have challenged our imaginations, awoken our wonder, and upturned our ideas about history, science, beauty and belief.

Picked from every walk of life, they encompass crops, weeds, medicines, religious gathering-places and a water lily named after a queen. Beginning with pagan cults and creation myths, the cultural significance of plants has burst upwards, sprouting into forms as diverse as the panacea (the cure-all plant ginseng, a single root of which can cost up to $10,000), Newton's apple, the African 'vegetable elephant' or boabab - and the mystical, night-flowering Amazonian cactus, the moonflower.

Ranging widely across science, art and cultural history, poetry and personal experience, Mabey puts plants centre stage, and reveals a true botanical cabaret, a world of tricksters, shape-shifters and inspired problem-solvers, as well as an enthralled audience of romantics, eccentric amateur scientists and transgressive artists. The Cabaret of Plants celebrates the idea that plants are not simply 'the furniture of the planet', but vital, inventive, individual beings worthy of respect - and that to understand this may be the best way of preserving life together on Earth.

About this title

Review:

Enraptured, visionary, witty and erudite (Daily Telegraph)

His language is as rich as the flora he describes ... he makes his case utterly convincingly (Times 2015-10-24)

A happy tangle of beautiful stories and studies from a career that has stepped between science and poetry ... We are lucky to have him. (Observer 2015-11-01)

One of this century's most influential passages of natural history writing ... meticulously detailed and rhapsodically narrated ... a magnificent book. (Mark Griffiths Country Life 2015-11-04)

A treat not to miss ... the prose is so gorgeous it makes you want to clap (Dominic Couzens BBC Countryfile 2015-10-01)

The finest current flowering of a great British tradition ... it makes you feel that your home is much bigger and stranger than you ever imagined and it makes you glad -- no, astounded -- to be alive. (The Sunday Times 2015-10-18)

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)

Wonderfully thought-provoking... of all his 30-plus books this is surely among his finest, an eclectic world-roaming collection of stories... lacing colour, intimacy and emotional texture around the scaffold of hard facts. (The Spectator 2015-10-17)

Mabey is on eloquent form in this portrayal of plants not as dully functional components of natural capital -- a "biological proletariat" -- but as unruly, autonomous and endlessly fascinating. This engaging scientific and cultural tour takes in ice-age engravings of plant forms; ancients and giants such as bristlecone pines and baobabs; the vast biodiversity of maize (corn); and, as touched on by plant scientist Ian Baldwin (Nature 522, 282-283; 2015), Erasmus Darwin's discovery of "irritability" in Mimosa pudica more than 200 years ago. (Andrew Jermy Nature Microbiology 2015-10-26)

Left me delighted - and seeing the world a little differently (Robert Macfarlane)

Book Description:

A Mabey magnum opus:'Mabey's finest, an eclectic world-roaming collection of stories ... lacing colour, intimacy and emotional texture around the scaffold of hard facts.' (Spectator)

About this edition

• Publisher: Profile Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1861979584
• ISBN 13: 9781861979582
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400