Richard Mabey

First published in Great Britain in 2015 under the title: The cabaret of plants: botany and the imagination.

Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination

The Cabaret of Plants

Fans of Food for Free will be delighted at this new format—ideal for carrying in a rucksack. Over 100 edible plants are featured together with recipes and other interesting culinary information. With details on how to pick, when to pick, and regulations on picking, this new format of a best-selling title provides a portable guide for all those who enjoy what the countryside has to offer. More than 100 plants are listed, fully illustrated, and described, together with recipes and other fascinating information about their use throughout the ages. The recipes are listed so that you can plan your foray with a feast in mind. This is the ideal book for both nature-lovers and cooks. Particularly with today's emphasis on the freshest and most natural of foods. There is also practical advice on how to pick plus the countryside laws and regulations on picking wild plants.

Food for Free

Ever since the first human settlements 10,000 years ago, weeds have dogged our footsteps. They are there as the punishment of 'thorns and thistles' in Genesis and , two millennia later, as a symbol of Flanders Field. They are civilisations' familiars, invading farmland and building-sites, war-zones and flower-beds across the globe. Yet living so intimately with us, they have been a blessing too. Weeds were the first crops, the first medicines. Burdock was the inspiration for Velcro. Cow parsley has become the fashionable adornment of Spring weddings.Weaving together the insights of botanists, gardeners, artists and poets with his own life-long fascination, Richard Mabey examines how we have tried to define them, explain their persistence, and draw moral lessons from them. One persons weed is another's wild beauty.

How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think about Nature

Weeds

Nature Cure

In The Cabaret of Plants, Mabey explores the plant species which have challenged our imaginations, awoken our 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 - and the mystical, night-flowering Amazonian cactus, the moonflower.Ranging widely across science, art and cultural history, poetry and personal experience, Mabey puts plants centre stage, and reveals a true botanical cabaret, a world of tricksters, shape-shifters and inspired problem-solvers, as well as an enthralled audience of romantics, eccentric amateur scientists and transgressive artists. The Cabaret of Plants celebrates the idea that plants are not simply 'the furniture of the planet', but vital, inventive, individual beings worthy of respect - and that to understand this may be the best way of preserving life together on Earth.

Literary Influences

On Living with the Weather

Turned Out Nice Again

Weeds survive, entombed in the soil, for centuries. They are as persistent and pervasive as myths. They ride out ice ages, agricultural revolutions, global wars. They mark the tracks of human movements across continents as indelibly as languages. Yet to humans they are the scourge of our gardens, saboteurs of our best-laid plans. They rob crops of nourishment, ruin the exquisite visions of garden designers, and make unpleasant and impenetrable hiding places for urban ne'er-do-wells. Weeds can be destructive and troubling, but they can also be beautiful, and they are the prototypes of most of the plants that keep us alive. Humans have grappled with their paradox for thousands of years, and with characteristic verve and lyricism, Richard Mabey uncovers some of the deeper cultural reasons behind the attitudes we have to such a huge section of the plant world.

How vagabond plants gatecrashed civilisation and changed the way we think about nature

Flora Britannica

Richard Mabey's descent into clinical depression was so annihilating that he could neither work nor play, nor sustain relationships with family or friends. He was drinking too much — and, worst of all, had lost all pleasure in the outside world. This remarkable book charts his gradual return to joyfulness. Richard Mabey had lived his whole life in the Chilterns. As a boy, he had tramped over the hills, bird-watching and botanizing. As a man, he purchased a large wood, which he studied in detail over a number of years. He drew on the experience of the Chilterns in all his writings. When depression dragged him under, he felt as if all this was lost, denied, destroyed. InNature Curehe describes how he found the courage to change his habitat — from hills and chalk to watery fens and flat open spaces. He moved to Norfolk. He fell in love. Slowly, he started once more to look about him. Drawing always on the metaphors and myths of nature — the migration of birds, the magic of the changing seasons — he shows how the British countryside increased his understanding of what really matters and restored his sense of delight.

Six personal essays on natural science and romanticism.

The Perfumier and the Stinkhorn

Iain Sinclair

Mary Newcomb

During the early 1970s Richard Mabey explored crumbling city docks and overgrown bomb-sites, navigated inner city canals and car parks, and discovered there was scarcely a nook in our urban landscape incapable of supporting life. The Unofficial Countryside is a timely reminder of how nature flourishes against the odds, surviving in the most obscure and surprising places. First published 1973 by William Collins Sons & Co.

The Unofficial Countryside

The ideal portable companion, the world-renowned Collins Gem series returns with a fresh new look and updated material.

Food For Free (Collins Gem)

Derived from the author's Flora Britannica, this book takes a broad definition of herbs and includes 100 wild plants of England, Scotland and Wales. As well as describing them, the author gives an account of the role of wild herbs in social life, arts, custom and landscape.

Flora Britannica Book of Wild Herbs

A concise edition of the British bestseller, Flora Britannica. This smaller, portable edition is organized thematically, rather than botanically, such as Ôtrees', Ôplants as resources', Ôurban commons', and Ômidwinter greenery'. Makes available the fruits of five years of original research. Provides an account of the role of wild plants in social life, arts, custom and landscape. Information has been supplied by people all over Britain -- both rural and urban -- who recorded the cultural dimensions of their own flora, and sent in their memories and anecdotes, observations and regional knowledge. The result is a record of the native and naturalized plants of England, Scotland and Wales. 100+ color photos.

The Concise Edition

Concise Flora Britannica

Anne McIntyre

The most complete, most authoritative, most lavishly illustrated compendium of herbs available today. Offers a comprehensive, illustrated glossary of over 200 herbs and is supplemented with chapters on healing, body care, nutrition, and gardening.

How to Use Herbs for Healing, Nutrition, Body Care, and Relaxation

The New Age Herbalist

Richard J. Hand

Eric Robinson

Seamus Heaney

Ronald Blythe

Edward Strickland

Victoria Leatham

Simon Rae

Mark Storey

John Wain

Alan Brownjohn

John Barrell

Trevor Hold

Edward Storey

Gavin Ewart

Sean Street

Lotte Kramer

Greg Crossan

George Dixon

Tom Bates

Bob Heyes

E.P. Thompson

William Westwood

Brian Blade

Andrew Motion 

Roger Frith

R.S. Thomas

The official Journal of the John Clare Society, published annually to reflect the interest in, and approaches to, the life and work of the poet John Clare.

John Clare Society Journal, 12 (1993)

In these elegant, short essays, revered nature writer Richard Mabey attempts to marry a Romantic's view of the natural world with that of the meticulous observations of the scientist. By Romanticism, he refers to the view that nature isn't a machine to be dissected, but a community of which we, the observers, are inextricably part. And that our feelings about that community are a perfectly proper subject for reflection, because they shape our relationship with it. Scientists eshew such a subjective response, wanting to witness the natural world exactly, whatever feelings subsequently follow. Our feelings are an extension of our senses - sight, taste, smell, touch and sound - and here, in a sextet of inspiring meditations, Mabey explores each sensory response in what it means to interact with nature. From birdsong to poetry, from Petri-dish to microscope, this is a joyful union of meandering thoughts and intimate memories.

Six Personal Essays on Natural Science and Romanticism

In this remarkable journal of visits to Eden, Mabey transports his reader from Cornwall to the Mediterranean to the Tropics, from Old World to New, from present to personal memory, to new perspectives on our collective artistic and emotional past. Sensuous and evocative, exquisitely written, his new book challenges the reader to look differently at the world, and our place in the landscape. At the same time, Mabey is controversial in his views about what we mean by buzz words like 'renewable', or 'sustainable', and he is highly provocative in his final response to the Eden Project itself.

The Uses and Abuses of Plants

Fencing Paradise

Peter Marren

From sea squirts to slugs to Swallowtails, Bugs Britannica is the third beautifully illustrated book in Richard Mabey's landmark series, a companion volume to the bestselling classics Flora Britannica and Birds Britannica. Like those much-loved books, Bugs Britannica is not a biological guide but a richly illustrated cultural one, where British bugs are seen through the eyes of writers, musicians, artists, photographers and naturalists - from the great Tudor naturalist, Thomas Muffet (father of Little Miss Muffet) to Irvine Welsh's talking tapeworm in Filth - with vivid contributions and observations by members of the public, fascinated by creepy-crawlies of all kinds. Taking British invertebrates as its subject, the book is structured along a roughly evolving path, from simple cell life-forms - amoeba, worms, crustaceans (proof, say the authors, of `just how far you can go on very little') - to bugs we all might recognise - spiders, butterflies, bees - and back into the water to meet the molluscs and `almost-fish'... It works so triumphantly because author Peter Marren has examined bugs in the dusty corners of our houses and gardens as well as traversing mountains, lakes, fields and the seashore. He observes not only the fascinating habits of the bug world, but also the eccentric behaviour of the human bug obsessives. But, of course, the true heroes of the book are the bugs themselves: the nimble dicks, lady clocks, coffin-cutters and multitudes of others. From the Boring Sponge (its official name) to the Mermaid's Glove and Penis worm, via the Dark Crimson Underwing and Ruby-tailed wasp - this rich compendium of bugs is a must, not only for naturalists but for anyone who cares about the crawling, buzzing swarms which make up the estimated 40,000 species of bugs that live on or around Britain.

Richard Mabey

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