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Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation And Changed The Way We Think About Nature (2010)

by Richard Mabey(Favorite Author)

3.71 of 5 Votes: 4

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Profile Books

review 1: I had assumed the reviewers who complained about the difficulty of understanding the British names for weeds were either lazy or unacquainted with google, but having read this whole dreary volume I now sympathize with them. It's not so much that Mabey uses the British names, however; it's that he composes whole sentences that are just lists of weed names. Even if he had used the American names, I doubt I would have found these lists more interesting. It's too bad, since his knowledge is tremendous and his thesis an interesting one to explore. Essentially, he points out that, without humans, weeds don't exist. They thrive in the spaces of chaos we've carved out of the world: sunny tilled fields, treeless lawns, battlefields. Where we've cleared out native vegetation, weeds ... morehave moved in. He paints a thought-provoking portrait of an abandoned building on the edge of civilization: At first, weeds take over, sprouting out of every crevice and in every footprint. But soon, the habitat changes. The forest begins to creep in, shady spaces appear, forest vegetation grows, and weeds fade into the background. There are other interesting factoids, including reference to some intruiging sci-fi movies with weeds as main characters, but someone needed to help Mabey "weed" out the tedious lists (har, har).
review 2: Richard Mabey takes us from weeds' medieval double-employment in sympathetic magic and the theological Doctrine of Signatures, to the cutthroat world of 17th-century soldier-herbalists like Nicholas Culpeper, to John Ruskin’s strange disgust at the idea of photosynthesis (reducing flowers to mere “gasometers”), to the unexpected botanical marvels of London’s WWII bomb craters, and finally to dystopian science-fiction futures when human beings and all their works are remorselessly consumed by a tsunami of kudzu.Along the way we feast on a vernacular glossary matched only by that of the Lepidoptera, plants with names like gallant soldier, love in idleness, henbane, fat-hen, shepherd’s purse, pellitory-of-the-wall, stinking mayweed, giant hogweed, yellow rattle, self-heal, and welcome-home-husband-though-never-so-drunk. Mabey introduces us to “species that relish beheading,” an alfalfa seedling that sprouts “in the moist warmth of a patient’s eyelid,”plants with “leaves smelling of beef gravy,” and “the notorious Atheist’s Fig” that sprouted from the coffin of a blasphemer.Weeds, Mabey reminds us, are simply plants in places we’d rather they weren’t. “A tendency to weediness in a plant is as much a matter of opportunity as a fixed character trait.” And in their metamorphic qualities, their talent for endurance, rabid opportunism, and capacity of exploiting and adjusting themselves to the environment, and the environment to themselves, “the species they most resemble,” says Mabey, “is us.” less

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