The Cabaret of Plants is a masterful, globe-trotting exploration of
the relationship between humans and the kingdom of plants by the
renowned naturalist Richard Mabey.
A rich, sweeping, and wonderfully readable work of botanical history,
The Cabaret of Plants explores dozens of plant species that for
millennia have challenged our imaginations, awoken our wonder, and
upturned our ideas about history, science, beauty, and belief. Going
back to the beginnings of human history, Mabey shows how flowers, trees,
and plants have been central to human experience not just as sources of
food and medicine but as objects of worship, actors in creation myths,
and symbols of war and peace, life and death.
Writing in a celebrated style that the Economist calls "delightful and
casually learned," Mabey takes readers from the Himalayas to Madagascar
to the Amazon to our own backyards. He ranges through the work of
writers, artists, and scientists such as da Vinci, Keats, Darwin, and
van Gogh and across nearly 40,000 years of human history: Ice Age images
of plant life in ancient cave art and the earliest representations of
the Garden of Eden; Newton's apple and gravity, Priestley's sprig of
mint and photosynthesis, and Wordsworth's daffodils; the history of
cultivated plants such as maize, ginseng, and cotton; and the ways the
sturdy oak became the symbol of British nationhood and the giant sequoia
came to epitomize the spirit of America.
Complemented by dozens of full-color illustrations, The Cabaret of
Plants is the magnum opus of a great naturalist and an extraordinary
exploration of the deeply interwined history of humans and the natural
world.
