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

The publisher’s description calls this a botanical history, but it is really much more. Yes, Mabey begins with plants and cave art and proceeds through the present with human reactions to plants. Mabey fills the book throughout with beautifully written examples covering art, exploration, science of......more

Richard Mabey, noted British naturalist, has produced an impassioned plea for accepting plants on their own terms by demonstrating the diverse and still imperfectly understood life processes of plants that take place for the purposes of plants themselves rather than for those of humans. In the proce......more

Can I possibly need more research on the subject after reading Mabey's wonderful book? This is a comprehensive and very enjoyable work on various species of plants and their relationship with mankind. If you would like to learn which trees possessed mystical characteristics for our ancestors, and wh......more

A whole string of essays about cool plants: giant Amazonian water-lilies, ancient pagan yews, ferns, daffodils...I learned a lot, and Mabey's writing has flashes of inspiration. But it doesn't quite hold together. I wish there was a clearer theme, a direction for all of these sketches. But rather th......more