A lively and lyrical cultural history of plants in the wrong place, by one of Britain's best and most admired nature writers
Richard Mabey is Britain's foremost nature writer, and the author of Flora Britannica, which won a British Book Award, and Birds Britannica. He has a regular column in BBC Wildlife magazine and has written extensively on nature for the national broadsheets.
This book will open your eyes to the significance, wonder and
exasperation felt about weeds. I couldn't put the book down once I
started reading. Mabey offers a diversity and richness of fact,
fiction, philosophy and fun ... [he] opens our minds and hearts in
unexpected ways to the fallacy of an implacable divide between
people and nature ... a great read.
*Professor Stephen Hopper, Director, Kew Gardens*
Richard Mabey's journey through the realm of weeds is witty,
learned and original. It says as much about us as these maligned
plants, and is a surprising tale. His delightful book will not make
weeding any easier but it will make it an intellectual activity and
thus a philosophical one. The writing is stunning, the argument
undeniable. Some plants and most people have a problem which will
never go away.
*Ronald Blythe*
Mr Mabey is the kind of person you wish you had with you on every
country walk, identifying, explaining, deducing, drawing on deep
knowledge lightly worn.
*Country Life*
A fascinating display of personal knowledge of the history of
different species and their changing status in the minds of our
ancestors. Excellent.
*Daily Mail*
[Mabey] is the steward of a pastoral tradition in which highly
personal responses to landscape are matched by expert environmental
concerns; his ideas have become standard with no loss of urgency
... he deepens symbolic value by combining close attention to
details with a more sweeping sense of things. In Weeds, Mabey has
written a memorable hymn to the marginal.
*Guardian*
The nation's favourite nature writer.
*Sunday Telegraph*
Mabey weaves social history, psychology, literature and art into
his clear rendering of plant biology. Explanations of evolution sit
alongside explorations of flower symbolism in Shakespeare.
*Nature*
Told with delight in the "sheer opportunism" of weeds, and their
right to do what all living things do - to grow, whenever and
wherever possible. A treat.
*Financial Times*
Enraptured, visionary, witty and erudite ... firmly in the Gilbert
White tradition. Why, by the way, can English writers do this
better than anybody else?
A fascinating read.
*Telegraph*
A witty, wise insight into the floral world and our capricious
relationship with some of its more boisterous inhabitants.
*BBC Countryfile*
Delightful and casually learned.
*Economist*
Mabey's amble through the low-level, high-rise world of weeds is
rich in lore and usefulness. As in all his work, what comes across
is his abiding passion for plants and the sustenance they give both
imaginatively and spiritually.
Richard Mabey writes about weeds with the confident affection of
someone discussing old friends ... this [book] is as much a
celebration of the vexed coupling between mankind and plantlife as
it is a fine marriage between subject and author.
*Observer/The Guardian*
Mabey is the gardener's greatest comforter.
*The Times*
A fascinating read. You read this book you will never look at weeds
in quite the same way again - Richard has done them a service and
us by enabling the reader to join him in this entertaining and
insightful book.
*www.recklessgardener.com*
A newish sort of nature has flourished: desolate, unruly, even rank
and unwelcome, but suited to an age of ecological decline and
catastrophist visions. Richard Mabey is in several senses the
modest eminence behind this almost-movement ... As ever with Mabey
there's a poetry to all this creeping ecology. Even the book's
glossary of plant names is a verbal joy ... He's a precise and
witty writer
*Sunday Telegraph*
Mabey is incapable of writing a tedious sentence and this book
strays into as many byways as the seed of rosebay willow herb ...
completely riveting ... he's at his best in the most unexpected
areas.
His strength lies in his ability to view his subject not
dispassionately, for he writes with magnificent passion, but in a
way that removes us, the true interlopers as the most important
characters in the plot.
*Gardens Illustrated*
The best book on British wild flowers in a decade ... Read this
quietly enthralling book and you will never again look at these
most familiar plants in quite the same way.
*Independent*
Mabey is as well versed in the literature of weeds as in the
botany, richly weaving his own observations with the words of
others; Shakespeare on nettles, Ruskin on poppies, Thoreau on
brambles and Will Self on 'blisterweed'.
Mabey uses weeds as a way to explore wider ideas about the natural
world and how humans interact with it ... a profound and
sympathetic meditation.
You'll look at weeds in a whole new way.
*Sunday Times*
Weaves together his unrivalled botanical knowledge with tales from
history.
*Countryman*
A fascinating and eye-opening book, one that makes you view the
world around you afresh.
*Big Issue Scotland*
A fantastic cultural history of vagabond plants ... fascinating and
truly eye-opening.
*Big Issue London*
Profound stuff
*Irish News*
A delightful and quietly funny read
*Irish Times*
He never disappoints - buy this book for the gardener in your life,
and convert them to the wonder of weeds
*Guardian*
As long as humanity has tried to control nature, weeds have been
our unwanted companions. In this fascinating, richly detailed book,
Richard Mabey gives weeds their full due, chronicling their
changing relationship to us from the ancient world to the age of
invasive species and genetically modified plans. Weeds are not just
a particular collection of plants, Mabey makes clear; they are,
instead, a reflection of our own culture - perhaps, our own
weediness.
*Carl Zimmer, author of Evolution*
Weeds are persistent, ubiquitous, and, to the uninitiated,
annoying, but they are also biological marvels that have evolved
side by side with human civilization. Richard Mabey's personal,
historical, and cultural viewpoint converts weeds into
intellectually stunning wild flowers!
*Bill Streever, author of Cold*
Richard Mabey is Britain's leading natural history writer, and this
is his witty and beguiling meditation on weeds and their wily ways.
Mabey suggests that weeds and wild flowers, those ruthless
"gatecrashers of civilization" are really part of nature's secret
immune system, rushing in to repair our damaged planet. Provoking
and affectionate, this extraordinary book challenges notions of
both culture and agriculture. You will never look at a weed, or
flourish a garden fork, in the same way again.
*Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder*
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