The Cabaret Of Plants: Botany And The Imagination

Author: Richard Mabey

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  • : $24.99 AUD
  • : 9781861979582
  • : Profile Books Limited
  • : Profile Books Ltd
  • : 0.605
  • : October 2016
  • : 198mm X 129mm
  • : 24.99
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  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Richard Mabey
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  • : Paperback
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Barcode 9781861979582
9781861979582

Description

In Richard Mabey's characteristically lyrical and informative tone, The Cabaret of Plants explores plant species which have challenged our imaginations, awoken that cliched 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.
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Author description

Richard Mabey is 'the nation's favourite nature writer' (Sunday Telegraph) and 'a national treasure' (Sunday Times), who, 'as a celebrant of the botanical ... has few peers' (Nature Microbiology). He is the author of thirty books, including the bestselling plant bible Flora Britannica, and Nature Cure, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread, Ondaatje and Ackerley Awards. A regular on radio and in the national press, he was elected a Fellow in the Royal Society of Literature in 2012.