Mr. Mabey doesn’t want to reduce plants to utilities functioning on our behalf. A subtly expressed theme through his 29 chapters on 40-some plants, is that they don’t need us the way we need them. Their real gift to human beings, he writes, is to demonstrate 'different models of being alive.'”
The book reads as a happy tangle of beautiful stories and studies from a career that has stepped between science and poetry, or as its subtitle says, between botany and the imagination.
...new research suggests that plants might have lives beyond our current understanding. Perhaps they are capable of taking deliberate action, just as animals do. It’s a shame that this topic occupies only the last 10 pages of Mabey’s book, because it does more to prove his point than everything that came before, however interesting and entertaining it might have been.
