The Cabaret of Plants

According to The Guardian's review of The Cabaret of Plants, botanist Richard Mabey has "a poet's eye" for plants, and I agree. However, while I found the book fascinating and the research awe-inspiring, I have to admit I also found it a tad tedious to read.

I think it's safe to blame a short attention span. (Mine.) Or perhaps it's better to blame my disappointment on unrealistic expectations.

British Naturalist Mabey is a fine and competent writer. The book, subtitled Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination, presents not one unifying story of the history of plants, but rather breaks up the work into species, families, and a few particularly interesting periods in plant life.

A Reader Out on a Limb

A fair portion of the beginning of the book focuses on trees, which I rarely think of as plants. So, there you have it - it's quite possible I'm just not sophisticated enough to read Mabey's works. I tried anyway.

From trees and bushes to corn, cotton and medicinal plants, The Cabaret covers it all. (Well, a lot of ground, anyway.) It is a broad and deep work, and if not comprehensive, it's certainly an extensive overview. I think it would make an excellent and much-appreciated gift for botany majors, master gardeners, and serious historians and naturalists.

The chapter Harlequins and Mimics: The Orchid Troupe, for example, juxtaposes the so-called "Tulip Fever" with the even more heated period of "Orchid Fever," both of which occurred during the late 1800s and raised the price of the flowers astronomically. The chapter describes both periods and both plant families, digging deep into the history, psychology and botany the brought on both fevers. Among other things.

It followed a similarly well-researched chapter, The Challenge of Carnivorous Plants: The Tipitiwitchet, which begins with an excerpt from a 1759 letter by Arthur Dobbs, then governor of North Carolina.  In it Dobbs describes a "kind of Catchfly sensitive which closes upon any thing that touches it." The letter was later quoted in Charles Nelson's biography of the Venus Flytrap, which Mabey explains "would for the next hundred years unsettle...ideas about the the distinctive character of plants and their place in the natural scheme of things."

Image: Wikipedia

Not only did cute-but-not-cuddly carnivorous plants upset the concept of the Great Chain of Being in the 18th century, according to Mabey, "The debate sparked off by the flytrap had epistemological repercussions too. It put the usefulness of biologic analogy - a favourite* eighteenth-century mode of 'explanation' - to severe test."

When discussing the Tipitiwitchet, Mabey doesn't stop with the botanical history of the plant or the era; he also adds a language lesson, explaining how the original name (the similarly spelled titipiwitshik, in the Lenape language of the East Coast Indians) was almost certainly purposefully "tweaked" to bring to mind the female genitalia in word as much as it might in its visual appearance.

(I'll leave you to your own devices here.)

Scat and Other Organic Stuff Makes Its Presence Known

I get really excited about plants as health food - medicine, if you must - and that's why I picked up Cabaret in the first place. Not surprisingly, then, my favorite chapters were those describing plant remedies in history (Ginseng, in particular) and Maize. Mabey validated my feelings about the tremendous wealth of knowledge we have destroyed in wiping out virtually all Native American medical knowledge, and barely protecting what we could have learned - and could still! - from people too often ignored in the Appalachian Mountains and the Ozarks.

Mabey makes sure not to ignore the animal kingdom, giving credit where credit is due to those who worked alongside plants lo these many years to spread their botanical wonder.

Which is to say, the varieties of apples we enjoy eating today has a lot to do with which ones the Chinese brown bears preferred way back when. They picked sweet ones, ate them, pooped out the seeds with a ready-to-plant plop of manure, and viola! our apple crop came about. Naturally.

Don't Drink While Reading Cabaret

Mabey's writing is more formal and flowery than I enjoy. That said, I mean it when I say he's a fine writer. Just, perhaps, not my favorite type.

I had really hoped The Cabaret of Plants would be more in the easy-breezy style of The World According to Soccer or have a more unifying story line like A Perfect Red. I truly enjoy learning new things, but simply wasn't primed to pick up Plants, which seemed more like a textbook than a book club pick like the oh-so-readable story of Henrietta Lacks.

Maybe I need to break my habit of reading as I relax with a glass of wine...

I don't want to judge a book by its cover, but isn't the UK title (pictured top right) much more exciting to look at than the US publication here, at left? 

Regardless, open the book and you'll find fantastic artwork that provide welcome, colorful displays on the otherwise info-packed pages of text. 

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Happy reading, gardening, and eating, my friends. 

Care to offer a rebuttal? Are you a more sophisticated

reader than I? I welcome comments and guest reviews! 

*The author uses the Queen's English. There; you've been warned.