The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination - Tapa blanda

Enraptured, visionary, witty and erudite (Daily Telegraph)

His language is as rich as the flora he describes ... he makes his case utterly convincingly (Times 2015-10-24)

A happy tangle of beautiful stories and studies from a career that has stepped between science and poetry ... We are lucky to have him. (Observer 2015-11-01)

One of this century's most influential passages of natural history writing ... meticulously detailed and rhapsodically narrated ... a magnificent book. (Mark Griffiths Country Life 2015-11-04)

A treat not to miss ... the prose is so gorgeous it makes you want to clap (Dominic Couzens BBC Countryfile 2015-10-01)

The finest current flowering of a great British tradition ... it makes you feel that your home is much bigger and stranger than you ever imagined and it makes you glad -- no, astounded -- to be alive. (The Sunday Times 2015-10-18)

Mr Mabey is the kind of person you wish you had with you on every country walk, identifying, explaining, deducing, drawing on deep knowledge lightly worn. (Country Life)

Wonderfully thought-provoking... of all his 30-plus books this is surely among his finest, an eclectic world-roaming collection of stories... lacing colour, intimacy and emotional texture around the scaffold of hard facts. (The Spectator 2015-10-17)

Mabey is on eloquent form in this portrayal of plants not as dully functional components of natural capital -- a "biological proletariat" -- but as unruly, autonomous and endlessly fascinating. This engaging scientific and cultural tour takes in ice-age engravings of plant forms; ancients and giants such as bristlecone pines and baobabs; the vast biodiversity of maize (corn); and, as touched on by plant scientist Ian Baldwin (Nature 522, 282-283; 2015), Erasmus Darwin's discovery of "irritability" in Mimosa pudica more than 200 years ago. (Andrew Jermy Nature Microbiology 2015-10-26)

Left me delighted - and seeing the world a little differently (Robert Macfarlane)

Richard Mabey is 'the nation's favourite nature writer' (Sunday Telegraph) and 'a national treasure' (Sunday Times), who, 'as a celebrant of the botanical ... has few peers' (Nature Microbiology). He is the author of thirty books, including the bestselling plant bible Flora Britannica, and Nature Cure, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread, Ondaatje and Ackerley Awards. A regular on radio and in the national press, he was elected a Fellow in the Royal Society of Literature in 2012.