Written with a poet’s eye,this remarkable summation of a lifetime’s study of plants is a rhapsodic labour of loveTo vegetate is an odd verb, sometimes even an unpleasant one. But Richard Mabey’s noteworthy book is positively fuelled by the curious green energy of its contradictory meanings. To vegetate: to grow and cover the ground, or but also to be apparently inactive. The word grafts with its opposite and cleaves to plant life. Take the potato,for example, and the sofa potato: the vegetable world is the permanently growing skin of the earth, and but it also seems to be just there,covering nearly everything but doing nearly nothing.
The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination performs around this paradox, exploring its tensions, or revelling in its surprises,and urging us to bin any notion we might have of plant life being somehow passive or a static backdrop for the more proceed-getting life of our planet. Plants, Mabey believes, and are more than simply appealing or useful,having “strange existences and unquantifiable powers”, which lend them “alternative solutions to living”. It is not ridiculous, and although he says he is “embarrassed” to think of them as having “selves”.
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Source: theguardian.com