Part memoir, part rumination on the relationship between humans and the natural world, this new book from Richard Mabey is a delight, says Alys Fowler
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Richard Mabey loves this dance, the one between culture and nature. He’s spent the best part of half a century waltzing across it. And you could pick any one of his 40 or so books and find an erudite, witty, very well-referenced argument for embracing the wild. Long before rewilding or ‘nature writing’ became such categories, Mabey was pointing out that weeds are very interesting and probably best not observed as unwanted (in his books Flora Britannica, Food for Free, Weeds, A Brush with Nature to name but a few), that the abandoned spaces often have an inherent beauty when nature is allowed to play (The Unofficial Countryside, The Flowering of Britain, The Cabaret of Plants) and all of this is very good for us, though sometimes when in the middle of the storm of our psyche, that can be hard to see (Nature Cure, Beechcombings, Turned Out Nice Again).
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I cannot think of a book of his I wouldn’t recommend. Nature Cure made me fall in love with the poet John Clare, The Unofficial Countryside gave me permission to jump the fence and my Flora Britannica has served as a bible, it is so well thumbed and stained. So, I was thrilled to hear there was another book coming, but curious too to see what he might want to add to this impressive body of work.
Twenty years ago, Mabey and his partner Polly set up home in Norfolk. We learn early on that it is this late-life romance that brought this man of outside, of field margins and wild edges, his first garden to call his own. And this book is an account of what it means for two people to come together in a garden and find room ‘for both the weeds and the wilderness and the defining human habit of pottering’. Over ten chapters he explores what it means to plant things, vegetations, ideas, people and places.
I felt like I’d spent a great afternoon, lying in the dappled shade of a garden tree, listening to Mabey muse on a life with plants
These are wide-ranging debates that cover the gender-fluid nature of plants, decolonisation, migration, native/non-native, reparations for nature through the lens of the wood, the lawn, the pond and the flowerbed. There are times in these discussions where you feel he might not negotiate the hot coals of such topics; of what it means to call a plant an alien or an immigrant as a white native man. But don’t be fooled. By the end of the chapter he has succinctly, neatly wrapped up the deal. He started life, as he likes to remind us, as a philosophy student, and the tricky, thorny thoughts we put on plants are the meat of his work.
Where do plants belong, he asks? Where they care to be. They ‘have always been autonomous wanderers’ that ‘aren’t passive objects of landscape; they help compromise and shape [those] landscapes, and our experience of place’. He then peppers the argument further with a choice stanza from John Clare: ‘Not mind alone the instinctive mood declares/ but birds and flowers and insects are its heirs/ taste is their joyous heritage and they? All choose for joy in a peculiar way’. As someone who is not only a fan of plants’ proper dwelling places being where they choose, but also one who has found great solace and hope from this autonomy, how does a need for a Mediterranean bed in ‘English nitrogen heavy rains’ fit into this?
And I think it is here in the ‘pottering’ that I loved this book best, because Mabey has mellowed and softened to himself. With failing eyesight and walking stick at hand, he gardens to remember: ‘botanising trips’, childhood haunts, plant and human friends. It is not a long book, but it is far from slight too. I felt like I’d spent a great afternoon, lying in the dappled shade of a garden tree, listening to Mabey muse on a life with plants.
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