The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination by Richard Mabey review – a hymn to flower power

Written with a poet’s eye, this remarkable summation of a lifetime’s study of plants is a rhapsodic labour of love

To vegetate is an odd verb, sometimes even an unpleasant one. But Richard Mabey’s great book is positively fuelled by the curious green energy of its contradictory meanings. To vegetate: to grow and cover the ground, but also to be apparently inactive. The word grafts with its opposite and cleaves to plant life. Take the potato, for example, and the couch potato: the vegetable world is the permanently growing skin of the earth, but it also seems to be just there, covering almost everything but doing almost nothing.

The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination performs around this paradox, exploring its tensions, 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 go-getting life of our planet. Plants, Mabey believes, are more than simply attractive or useful, having “strange existences and unquantifiable powers”, which lend them “alternative solutions to living”. It is not ridiculous, although he says he is “embarrassed” to think of them as having “selves”.

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