The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination

306 Pages·2015·7.28 MB·English

by  Mabey

THE
CABARET
OF
PLANTS
RICHARD MABEY is one of our greatest nature writers. He is the author of some
thirty books, including the bestselling plant bible Flora Britannica, Food for
Free, Turned Out Nice Again, Weeds: the Story of Outlaw Plants and Nature
Cure which was shortlisted for the Whitbread, Ondaatje and Ackerley Awards.
His biography, Gilbert White, won the Whitbread Biography Award. A regular
commentator on radio and in the national press, he was elected a Fellow in the
Royal Society of Literature in 2012. He lives in Norfolk.
Also by Richard Mabey The Perfumier and the Stinkhorn Turned Out Nice
Again Weeds
Food for Free The Unofficial Countryside The Common Ground The Flowering
of Britain Gilbert White Home Country Whistling in the Dark: In Pursuit of the
Nightingale Flora Britannica Selected Writing 1974–1999
Nature Cure
Fencing Paradise Beechcombings A Brush with Nature Dreams of the Good
Life: The Life of Flora Thompson and the Creation of Lark Rise to Candleford
THE
CABARET
OF
PLANTS
BOTANY AND THE IMAGINATION
RICHARD MABEY
for Vivien
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age …
Dylan Thomas
Contents Introduction: The Vegetable Plot
HOW TO SEE A PLANT
1. Symbols from the Ice: Plants as Food and Forms
2. Bird’s-Eyes: Primulas
WOODEN MANIKINS: THE CULTS OF TREES
3. The Cult of Celebrity: The Fortingall Yew
4. The Rorschach Tree: Baobab
5. The Big Trees: Sequoias
6. Methuselahs: Bristlecones and Date Palms
7. Provenance and Extinction: Wood’s Cycad
8. From Workhorse to Green Man: The Oak
MYTHS OF CULTIVATION
9. The Celtic Bush: Hazel
10. The Vegetable Lamb: Cotton
11. Staff of Life: Maize
12. The Panacea: Ginseng
13. The Vegetable Mudfish: Samphire
THE SHOCK OF THE REAL: SCIENTISTS AND ROMANTICS
14. Life versus Entropy: Newton’s Apple
15. Intimations of Photosynthesis: Mint and Cucumber
16. The Challenge of Carnivorous Plants: The Tipitiwitchet
17. Wordsworth’s Daffodils
18. On Being Pollinated: Keats’s Forget-Me-Not
NEW LANDS, NEW VISIONS
19. Jewels of the Desert: Francis Masson’s Starfish and Birds of Paradise
20. Growing Together: The East India Company’s Fusion Art
21. Chiaroscuro: The Impressionists’ Olive Trees
22. Local Distinctiveness: Cornfield Tulips and Horizontal Flax
THE VICTORIAN PLANT THEATRE
23. ‘Vegetable jewellery’: The Fern Craze
24. ‘The Queen of Lilies’: Victoria amazonica
25. A Sarawakan Stinkbomb: The Titan Arum
26. Harlequins and Mimics: The Orchid Troupe
THE REAL LANGUAGE OF PLANTS
27. The Butterfly Effect: The Moonflower
28. The Canopy Cooperative: Air Plants and Bromeliads
29. Plant Intelligence: Mimosa
Epilogue: The Tree of After Life
Additional References and Sources
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Index
Introduction: The Vegetable Plot
JUST BEFORE HE DIED in 1888 Edward Lear sketched the last of the surreal
additions to evolution’s menagerie that he’d begun with the Bong-tree in ‘The
Owl and the Pussycat’ nearly twenty years before. His Nonsense Botany is a
series of impish cartoons of preposterous floral inventions. It includes a
strawberry bush bearing puddings instead of fruit, the parrot-flowered
Cockatooca superba and the unforgettable Manypeeplia upsidownia, a kind of
Solomon’s seal with minute humans suspended like flowers along the bowed
stalk. Lear was a lifelong sufferer from epilepsy and depressive episodes (which
he nicknamed ‘the Morbids’ as if they were a tribe of gloomy rodents) and the
obsessive fun he had with words and forms may have been a way of exorcising
his melancholy. But I suspect there is more to his final creation. Lear was an
astute botanist as well as a brilliant humorist. He’d travelled and painted across
the Old World, especially in the Mediterranean, and had seen first hand many of
its bizarre plants, including the carrion-stinking dragon arum (which he
described as ‘brutal-filthy yet picturesque’), and I think his nonsense flora can be
seen as a kind of celebratory cabaret, an affectionate satire on the astonishing
revelations of nineteenth-century botany.