The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination

by Richard Mabey

Overview

"Highly entertaining…Without being sentimental about it, Mr. Mabey gets us to look at life from the plants' point of view. His science is sound, he's witty, and his language is engaging." —Constance Casey, New York Times

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393239973
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/11/2016
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Richard Mabey is the author of Food for Free, Flora Britannica, and Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants, among other books. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has narrated popular BBC television and radio series and written for the Guardian and Granta. He lives in Norfolk, England.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Vegetable Plot 1

How to See a Plant 10

1 Symbols from the Ice: Plants as Food and Forms 13

2 Bird's-Eyes. Primulas 26

Wooden Manikins: The Cults of Trees 41

3 The Cult of Celebrity: The Fortingall Yew 47

4 The Rorschach Tree: Baobab 64

5 The Rig Trees: Sequoias 72

6 Methuselahs: Bristlecones and Date Palms 77

7 Provenance and Extinction: Wood's Cycad 83

8 From Workhorse to Green Man: The Oak 89

Myths of Cultivation 108

9 The Celtic Bush: Hazel 110

10 The Vegetable Lamb: Cotton 122

11 Staff of Life: Maize 133

12 The Panacea: Ginseng 142

13 The Vegetable Mudfish: Samphire 159

The Shock of the Real: Scientists and Romantics 164

14 Life versus Entropy: Newton's Apple 167

15 Intimations of Photosynthesis: Mint and Cucumber 176

16 The Challenge of Carnivorous Plants: The Tipitiwitchet 184

17 Wordsworth's Daffodils 198

18 On Being Pollinated: Keats's Forget-Me-Not 209

New Lames, New Visions 220

19 Jewels of the Desert: Francis Masson's Starfish and Birds of Paradise 225

20 Growing Together: The East India Company's Fusion Art 232

21 Chiaroscuro: The Impressionists' Olive Trees 239

22 Local Distinctiveness: Cornfield Tulips and Horizontal Flax 246

The Victorian Plant Theatre 253

23 'Vegetable jewellery': The Fern Craze 258

24 'The Queen of Lilies': Victoria amazonica 264

25 A Sarawakan Stinkbomb: The Titan Arum 275

26 Harlequins and Mimics: The Orchid Troupe 279

The Real Language of Plants 308

27 The Butterfly Effect: The Moonflower 311

28 The Canopy Cooperative: Air Plants and Bromeliads 323

29 Plant Intelligence: Mimosa 329

Epilogue: The Tree of After Life 339

Additional References and Sources 343

List of Illustrations 358

Acknowledgements 362

Index 364

Editorial Reviews

…for many people plants are so boring as to be almost invisible. We pay attention to a few flashy plant celebrities—perfumed roses, a thousand red tulips, a loaded tomato plant—but we are insufficiently curious about how plants live. Mr. Mabey's highly entertaining book…is a welcome corrective. He wants us to care about how these growing things, with which we share primeval genes, solve the big problem of life: staying alive to reproduce. Without being sentimental about it, Mr. Mabey gets us to look at life from the plants' point of view. His science is sound, he's witty and his language is engaging.

The New York Times - Constance Casey

11/09/2015
In his inimitable style, English naturalist Mabey (The Ash and the Beech) blends genres to produce a work that demonstrates his passion for the lives of plants. By incorporating natural history, travel writing, and mainstream botany into a text rich with philosophy, poetry, and visual art, Mabey brings a sense of excitement and vitality to his material (the book’s illustrations are paired well with the text and greatly enhance it). One of his goals is to move readers beyond the simplistic idea that plants are passive and uninteresting members of ecosystems. As he explains it, he has written a “story about plants as authors of their own lives and an argument that ignoring their vitality impoverishes our imaginations and our well-being.” He succeeds admirably in this task, whether he is discussing the 20,000 varieties of apples that have been bred from a single original stock, the critical role that olive trees played in the development of Impressionist art, or the complex ways in which plants communicate with one another. Mabey is delightfully eclectic in his approach, often touching on those species with which he has a personal connection, but he consistently advances his central theme while providing interesting insights and opinions. Illus. Agency: InkWell Management. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"The greatest writer on nature alive…. [Mabey] fuses botany, art and literature into a prose which is interrogative, pungent, and urgently alive."

Evening Standard (UK)

"A powerful shock to those of us who thought that plants can’t think. . . . Interesting and entertaining."

Amy Stewart

"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!"

BBC (UK) - Dominic Couzens

"Mabey’s book lets us see plants as subjects rather than objects, arrayed in all their colors, performing miraculous tricks, dances and acrobatics. . . . [His] lyrical prose enlivens the history of botanical understanding . . . [and] many readers will reel out of Mr. Mabey’s stimulating cabaret with their view of the plant world—the living world we all share—enriched beyond measure."

Wall Street Journal - Jenny Uglow

"A gorgeous and engaging book. . . . There are so many delights to be found in Cabaret—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."

Washington Independent Review of Books - Jennifer Bort Yacovissi

"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."

Starred review Booklist

★ 2015-09-23
A prolific and talented British nature writer explores 40 plant species and how they have influenced the human imagination over the centuries. Comprised of equal portions of knowledge, delight, and surprise, Mabey's (The Ash and the Beech: The Drama of Woodland Change, 2013, etc.) botanical history advocates for elevating the status of plants within the natural world. Rather than being taken for granted as passive vegetation and viewed as merely "the furniture of the planet," the author recounts "a story about plants as authors of their own lives and an argument that ignoring their vitality impoverishes our imaginations and our well-being." Each section opens with a brief essay presenting a theme—e.g., "How To See A Plant," "The Shock of The Real: Scientists and Romantics," "The Victorian Plant Theatre"—followed by an exploration of specific plants. For those unschooled in botany, these preliminary excursions are nifty gateways into the unknown. Mabey artfully combines historical and contemporary scientific writings, literary musings, and his personal recollections concerning his plant subjects. The author ranges across time from the interest showed by Paleolithic cave artists and the vegetation in their environment to how both Neolithic farmers and 18th-century scientists attempted to understand the mysteries of agriculture and plant cultivation. Though many of the individuals and a handful of the plants Mabey discusses may be unfamiliar to some American readers, the author skillfully melds together this bounty of insights, opinions, and scientific facts into a coherent and intelligent narrative, overcoming any initial unfamiliarity readers may experience. Numerous drawings and photographs enhance the book. What Mabey does best is invite readers to think about plants in a radical new way, even posing the question as to whether a plant's sensory abilities—electrostatic charges, chemical communication through pheromones and bio-acoustic sound waves—actually constitute intelligence. An unusual and vastly entertaining journey into the world of mysterious plant life as experienced by a gifted nature writer.

Kirkus Reviews

"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."

Booklist (starred review)

"Written with a typically Mabeyish mixture of wit, knowledge and intellectual power, The Cabaret of Plants…left me challenged and delighted—and seeing the world a little differently."

Robert Macfarlane

"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."

Spectator (UK)

"An unusual and vastly entertaining journey into the world of mysterious plant life as experienced by a gifted nature writer." ---Kirkus Starred Review

From the Publisher