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The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination
Richard Mabey
€ 14.99
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Description for The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination
Paperback. Num Pages: 384 pages. BIC Classification: WM; WNP. Category: (G) General (US: Trade); (P) Professional & Vocational; (U) Tertiary Education (US: College). Dimension: 131 x 197 x 31. Weight in Grams: 612.
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.
Product Details
Publisher
Profile Books Ltd
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2016
Condition
New
Weight
612g
Number of Pages
384
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
ISBN
9781861979582
SKU
V9781861979582
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
Ref
99-99
About Richard Mabey
Richard Mabey is 'the nation's favourite nature writer' (Sunday Telegraph) and 'a national treasure' (Sunday Times), who, 'as a celebrant of the botanical ... has few peers' (Nature Microbiology). He is the author of thirty books, including the bestselling plant bible Flora Britannica, and Nature Cure, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread, Ondaatje and Ackerley Awards. A regular on radio and in the national press, he was elected a Fellow in the Royal Society of Literature in 2012.
Reviews for The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination
Enraptured, visionary, witty and erudite
Daily Telegraph
His language is as rich as the flora he describes ... he makes his case utterly convincingly
Times
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
One of this century's most influential passages of natural history writing ... meticulously detailed and rhapsodically narrated ... a magnificent book.
Mark Griffiths
Country Life
A treat not to miss ... the prose is so gorgeous it makes you want to clap
Dominic Couzens
BBC Countryfile
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
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
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
Left me delighted - and seeing the world a little differently
Robert Macfarlane There are so many delights to be found in The Cabaret of Plants - from the hunt for the elusive Amazonian moonflower, to the wonder of self-rejuvenating yews that defy efforts to determine their age, to the sprouting of an extinct Judean palm from a 2,000 year-old excavated seed - and Mabey keeps us enthralled from first to last.
Jennifer Bort Yacovissi
Washington Independent Review of Books
The summation of a lifetime of looking at plants and reflecting on them ... the book reads as a happy tangle of beautiful stories and studies from a career that has stepped between science and poetry
Tim Dee
Observer
Mabey's book lets us see plants as subjects rather than objects, arrayed in all their colours, performing miraculous tricks, dances and acrobatics
Jenny Uglow
Wall Street Journal
Daily Telegraph
His language is as rich as the flora he describes ... he makes his case utterly convincingly
Times
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
One of this century's most influential passages of natural history writing ... meticulously detailed and rhapsodically narrated ... a magnificent book.
Mark Griffiths
Country Life
A treat not to miss ... the prose is so gorgeous it makes you want to clap
Dominic Couzens
BBC Countryfile
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
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
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
Left me delighted - and seeing the world a little differently
Robert Macfarlane There are so many delights to be found in The Cabaret of Plants - from the hunt for the elusive Amazonian moonflower, to the wonder of self-rejuvenating yews that defy efforts to determine their age, to the sprouting of an extinct Judean palm from a 2,000 year-old excavated seed - and Mabey keeps us enthralled from first to last.
Jennifer Bort Yacovissi
Washington Independent Review of Books
The summation of a lifetime of looking at plants and reflecting on them ... the book reads as a happy tangle of beautiful stories and studies from a career that has stepped between science and poetry
Tim Dee
Observer
Mabey's book lets us see plants as subjects rather than objects, arrayed in all their colours, performing miraculous tricks, dances and acrobatics
Jenny Uglow
Wall Street Journal