All Categories
    Filters
    Preferences
    Search

    Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination

    £9.89
    £10.99
    Price-Match is available in-store for recommended titles in CCCU module handbooks
    ISBN: 9781861979582
    Products specifications
    Attribute nameAttribute value
    AuthorMabey, Richard
    Pub Date06/10/2016
    BindingPaperback
    Pages384
    Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
    Ship to
    *
    *
    Shipping Method
    Name
    Estimated Delivery
    Price
    No shipping options
    Availability: Available for despatch from the bookshop in 48 hours
    A Mabey magnum opus: 'Mabey's finest, an eclectic world-roaming collection of stories...lacing colour, intimacy and emotional texture around the scaffold of hard facts.' - Spectator

    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.