It seems to be an article of faith among most writers that the making of The Book is the pinnacle of creative endeavour. Only through these long crusades against entropy can real seriousness of purpose be demonstrated. Book writing is like a military campaign, demanding ideological certainty, labyrinthine strategy, and the smug self-purification of abandoned weekends. Ask any author’s partner in the three months before delivery.
I’ve written 40 assorted nonfiction books, so I’m in the masochist majority. But I don’t subscribe to the view that this is where the most rewarding pleasure lies. Give me journalism for that any day – at least journalism that approximates to the writing of a journal. The joy of working at the existential coalface, capturing a moment when and where it happens: this has a special, honest urgency beside which the long game can seem unnaturally contrived.
This preference seems embedded in the way I think. I can work up big ideas, but preferably in short measure. The essay is my natural form, the equivalent of a satisfying round walk. The hatching of a good paragraph is even better, but nobody publishes those as standalone titles. Sweetest of all is a single sentence that snaps into place as compellingly as a musical catchphrase.
I think this is the reason why only about half a dozen of my books were entirely my idea. Most began as suggestions from other parties which cut across my usual thinking ruts and opened up new side routes. The Common Ground was a commission from a government council for a personal and uncensored book about nature conservation in Britain. For me, it turned into a master’s course in land-use politics and basic ecology. The Frampton Flora came about when publisher Anthony Cheetham (then at Century) asked for my opinion on a stash of Victorian flower paintings that had been discovered in the attic of a Gloucestershire manor house. The pictures were remarkable, and so was their origin, painted communally by the female members of a single family. The book that followed, part album, part cultural history, is the only one to have reached the top of the nonfiction bestseller lists. Weeds began with an invitation from Profile to do a cultural history of outlaw plants. I was beginning another contracted book at the time, but put it on ice because I had an immodest conviction that I was the writer who knew most about this subject, and wasn’t about to let anyone else do a botched job.
My latest, The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination, began in a similar way. About the time Neil MacGregor’s History of the World in 100 Objects was riding high, my agent suggested that I should try a history of the world in a hundred plants. I wasn’t drawn. There were already umpteen books along those lines, and even with a new twist I could envisage being mired interminably in the economic history of cotton and corn. But the idea burrowed into my mind, sending out tendrils to all manner of unexplored memories and unresolved questions. After a while I had conceived the idea of a collection of quirky biographies of plants that had changed the way we think, a perspective on the vegetal world that has always seemed to me the most respectful and fascinating.
I think suggestions from outside act on my imagination like a magnet on iron filings, reorientating scattered material so that it all points in the same direction, and setting an internal compass for future attentiveness. So I revisited the times I’d spent with Wordsworth’s “dancing” daffodils in the Lake District, only this time with the focus on how and why this particular flower had affected him so. I took my enthralment with prehistoric portrayals of animals into new areas, asking what cave artists had made – or not made – of the vegetation of their world. And gradually an underlying theme began to emerge, of plants as organisms that were autonomous and intelligent and the creative tension that had long existed between this revelatory idea and the tradition of plants as inanimate goods. I realised I had been nibbling the edges of this notion for most of my working life – it just needed a nudge from outside to make the pieces fall into place.
Extract
In the 1850s Europeans had their first news of the welwitschia, a Namibian desert plant whose single pair of leaves can live for 2,000 years, grow to immense size but remain in the permanently infantilised state of a seedling. Ten years later Charles Darwin had revealed the barely credible devices orchids used to conscript insect pollinators, including the launching of pollen-laden missiles. In a world of such remarkable organisms why shouldn’t there be a fly orchid dangling real flies like Bluebottlia buzztilentia in Edward Lear’s surreal Nonsense Botany? Lear’s bionic vegetables were botany’s reductio ad absurdum, the last tarantellas of a century in which plants had been just about the most interesting things on the planet. It wasn’t a fascination confined to the scientific elite. The general public had been agog, astounded by one botanical revelation after another. In America the discovery of the ancient sequoias of California in the 1850s drew tens of thousands of pilgrims, who saw in these giant veterans proof of their country’s manifest destiny as an unsullied Eden. (There were throngs of rubberneckers and partygoers too: 19th-century botany was far from sober-sided.) Similar numbers flocked to Kew Gardens in west London, where one of the star attractions was an Amazonian water lily whose leaves were so brilliantly engineered that their design became the model for the greatest glass building of the 19th century. What these moments of excited attention shared was not so much a simple pleasure in floral beauty or the promise of new sources of imperial revenue (though these were there too) but a sense of real wonder that units of non-conscious green tissue could have such strange existences and unquantifiable powers. Plants, defined by their immobility, had evolved extraordinary life-ways by way of compensation: the power to regenerate after most of their body had been eaten; the ability to have sex by proxy; the possession of more than twenty senses whose delicacy far exceeded any of our own. They made you think.
More about the book
… his amateurishness, as written, has always revealed the roots of the word: to be an amateur is to be a lover, and this is the book of a man in love with both the known facts of plants and the dreams they sponsor, a man who has a microscope at home and is eager to penetrate the mysteries of vegetal life, but who is just as likely to marvel or swoon at what he finds, and wish for such softer responses to be admitted as legitimate, so to keep (in Coleridge’s phrase) the heart alive in the head.
That is flower power, and that is this book’s concern. Mabey has little to say here about our national green-fingered obsession, our capture and fixing of the wild in our lawns, flower beds and allotments. Instead, he gardens with his imagination and by eavesdropping on others’ thoughts and fantasies of plants across thousands of years. His flowers are energetic, unpredictable, resourceful and transgressive. – Tim Dee
Buy the book
The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination is published by Profile at £9.99, and is available from the Guardian Bookshop for £8.19.
