The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination
The Cabaret of Plants is a masterful, globe-trotting exploration of the relationship between humans and the kingdom of plants by the renowned naturalist Richard Mabey.
A rich, sweeping, and wonderfully readable work of botanical history, The Cabaret of Plants explores dozens of plant species that for millennia have challenged our imaginations, awoken our wonder, and upturned our ideas about history, science, beauty, and belief. Going back to the beginnings of human history, Mabey shows how flowers, trees, and plants have been central to human experience not just as sources of food and medicine but as objects of worship, actors in creation myths, and symbols of war and peace, life and death.
Writing in a celebrated style that the Economist calls "delightful and casually learned," Mabey takes readers from the Himalayas to Madagascar to the Amazon to our own backyards. He ranges through the work of writers, artists, and scientists such as da Vinci, Keats, Darwin, and van Gogh and across nearly 40,000 years of human history: Ice Age images of plant life in ancient cave art and the earliest representations of the Garden of Eden; Newton's apple and gravity, Priestley's sprig of mint and photosynthesis, and Wordsworth's daffodils; the history of cultivated plants such as maize, ginseng, and cotton; and the ways the sturdy oak became the symbol of British nationhood and the giant sequoia came to epitomize the spirit of America.
Complemented by dozens of full-color illustrations, The Cabaret of Plants is the magnum opus of a great naturalist and an extraordinary exploration of the deeply interwined history of humans and the natural world.
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Richard Mabey is widely hailed as Britain's fore-most nature writer. He is the author of the groundbreaking book on foraging in the countryside Food for Free and the editor of The Oxford Book of Nature Writing. He has narrated and produced popular BBC television and radio series, and has written for the Guardian, Granta, and other publications. He lives in Norfolk, England.
A powerful shock to those of us who thought that plants can't think. . . . Interesting and entertaining.--Amy Stewart
A delightfully accessible work of scholarship.... Mabey's sensitive approach not only succeeds in giving these incredibly vital beings their just place in the story of life. It reminds us that, as we stare in the maw of large-scale environmental change, we can learn the right lessons from our relationship with plants and draw inspiration from their incredible resilience.
The greatest writer on nature alive.... [Mabey] fuses botany, art and literature into a prose which is interrogative, pungent, and urgently alive.
Wonderfully thought-provoking.... Of all his 30-plus books, this is surely among his finest, an eclectic world-roaming collection of stories ...lacing color, intimacy and emotional texture around the scaffold of hard facts.
This is the nature-writing equivalent of fine dining--rich, full of different tastes, lasting and satisfying. A treat not to miss.... Go, buy it, and feast. Botany rocks!--Dominic Couzens
