The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination by Richard Mabey - review

Our greatest living writer on the contested border between human culture and the life of nature. By Christopher Woodward
Rare find: left, The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination by Richard Mabey; right, Moonflowers by Margaret Mee
Tony Morrison/Nonesuch Expeditions/South American Pictures
Christopher Woodward22 October 2015

At 79, the artist Margaret Mee began a final quest to paint the flowering of the moonflower: a cactus that grows in the branches of a tree in the Amazon and opens on one night each year. She canoed up the river in an English sun hat and pyjamas with a revolver for drunken loggers. Mabey’s description of the moment at which the buds open into foot-long white blooms, and of the perfume released over the tea-coloured water is one of my favourite pieces of writing this year. The Cabaret of Plants — Edward Lear’s tease at the Victorian wish to be wowed by exotics — is a celebration of the lives of plants without us.

In fact, Mee worried that her team’s lights would inhibit the flowering. However, the value of her expedition was not just in campaigning for the rainforest (an anti-Fascist activist in Thirties Watford, she dedicated her old age to the Amazon environment), but in the observations studied after her death — six months later in a road accident. She had realised that the cactus flowered when flood waters were at their highest; botanists deduced that this was so that its seeds would be eaten, then excreted, by fish.

As Mabey takes us into the tree canopies of epiphytes — plants whose roots do not touch the ground — and moths with 10in tongues, we might be gliding into the benign astonishments of David Attenborough. But Mabey is a nature writer with anger and self-doubt who fuses botany, art, and literature into a prose which is interrogative, pungent and urgently alive.

Since he was a boy in the Chilterns and an anarchist at Oxford, Mabey has sided with “the vagrants, libertines and opportunists” of the plant world, as in recent masterpieces on weeds and the beech tree.

His first hit, Food for Free, was inspired by how the samphire of the Blakeney coast made, then inexplicably destroyed, its own habitat.

The Venus flytrap was the first plant to challenge the divine hierarchy of God, man, animals, plants and rock. Charles Darwin fed one plant insects, eggs, spit and steak, establishing that its hairs were selective in their response. Next, a contemporary worked out that if a fly touched two hairs it activated an electric charge, like in a battery.

But Mabey snaps shut at any New Age-ism towards flora, such as the 1974 bestseller The Secret Life of Plants, in which a CIA operative claimed that they were telepathic. He’s just as angry at our projection of ourselves onto flora, such as the modern fashion of justifying the existence of plants by their usefulness to us. They are not a “biological serving class”. Cabaret asks us to treat plants as “autonomous beings”, and to respect “the independence of our kingdoms… as two linked pathways to the challenge of being alive”.

Like Voltaire — who chose to be buried half-in, half-out of church — his mental energy is a consequence of restlessness at his position. Can we write about plants when words such as “time” or “pain” are meaningless?

Perhaps because his habitat is the contested border between human culture and the wild, the most vivid chapter of the book — so vivid I felt as if my face had been scratched by the undergrowth — is set in The Burren, County Clare. This landscape on the west coast of Ireland has been settled and abandoned in cycles, from Celtic forts to Euro-bungalows, a surreal ecology of dwarf hazel on limestone so sharp that Mabey’s Kickers’ soles are split open in a week. Plants stay put and humans escape but, in return, plants re-grow from stumps and we cannot.

In a “houseless garden” he is “an earnest young forager” again, squatting inside a hazel bush to spot the nuts against the sky. But underfoot are the “deep accusing pits” of his footsteps on precious moss.

It is Mabey’s mistrust of easy thoughts which make him the greatest writer on nature alive.

Christopher Woodward is director of London’s Garden Museum

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