The idea of plants as rebellious, intelligent organisms took years to take root – and with some care grew into The Cabaret of Plants
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.
The essay is my natural form, the equivalent of a satisfying round walk
Related: Richard Mabey – how plants think
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.
Related: The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination by Richard Mabey review – a hymn to flower power
Continue reading...