The Cabaret of Plants

In Richard Mabey's characteristically lyrical and informative tone, The Cabaret of Plants explores plant species which have challenged our imaginations, awoken that clichéd but real human emotion of 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, whose swollen trunks store thousands of litres of water - and the mystical, night-flowering Amazonian cactus, the moonflower.

From Ice Age artists, to the Romantic poets, via colonialism and the nineteenth century botanical mania of empire, Mabey concludes his magnum opus with the latest revelations of possible 'plant intelligence' in this extraordinary collection of encounters between plants and people.


Mabey is – or should be – a national treasure … the finest current flowering of a great British traditions that includes not just prose writers but also the poets William Wordsworth and John Clare… like being taken aside by a complete stranger who talks as if you have known each other for years… 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 2015-10-18)

The greatest writer on nature alive… [Mabey] fuses botany, art and literature into a prose which is interrogative, pungent and urgently alive. (The Evening Standard 2015-10-22)

The nation's favourite nature writer. (Sunday Telegraph)

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 2015-10-17)

His language is as rich as the flora he describes… each interaction between plant and people has its own story and each in Mabey's hands, with his frame of cultural and historical reference, is one of satisfying richness… he makes his case utterly convincingly: plants are not just individuals but indeed rather more interesting ones than many people. (Michael Prodger The Times 2015-10-24)


A Mabey Magnum Opus: an in-depth, beautifully-written and insightful exploration of humans and plants, from the author of Flora Britannica and Weeds