Book Review: The Cabaret Of Plants by Richard Mabey

Hardback by Profile Books, £20 (ebook £11.04)

Richard Mabey’s affinity with nature began as a child, when he spent days ‘up in the tangled attics of cedars’. These days the attics are more likely to be of the Royal Society of Literature, of which Mabey is a fellow, and the beautifully-produced Cabaret, drawing on plants in history, art, and literature demonstrates why.

A lifetime of pursuing primroses, oxlips, and samphire has led Mabey to a particular feeling about plants: that they’re not merely decorative or passive, the victims of exploitation or fashion, like unfortunate Victorian ferns. Instead they are mysteriously autonomous, speaking to each other through pheromones, vital and intelligent.

We have much to learn, he argues, from slowing our pace of natural-world inquiry down to plant-time. Self-contained chapters with high quality prints and drawings make this a lovely bed-time book into which to dip for Wordsworth’s daffodils or irreverently-discovered sequoias.