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 *