Weeds
Richard Mabey
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Ratgeber / Natur
Beschreibung
Ever since the first human settlements 10,000 years ago, weeds have dogged our footsteps. They are there as the punishment of 'thorns and thistles' in Genesis and , two millennia later, as a symbol of Flanders Field. They are civilisations' familiars, invading farmland and building-sites, war-zones and flower-beds across the globe. Yet living so intimately with us, they have been a blessing too. Weeds were the first crops, the first medicines. Burdock was the inspiration for Velcro. Cow parsley has become the fashionable adornment of Spring weddings.
Weaving together the insights of botanists, gardeners, artists and poets with his own life-long fascination, Richard Mabey examines how we have tried to define them, explain their persistence, and draw moral lessons from them.
One persons weed is another's wild beauty.
Rezensionen
Delightful and casually learned.
A fantastic cultural history of vagabond plants ... fascinating and truly eye-opening.
Told with delight in the "sheer opportunism"
Richard Mabey'
Mabey is the gardener'
Weeds are persistent, ubiquitous, and, to the uninitiated, annoying, but they are also biological marvels that have evolved side by side with human civilization. Richard Mabey'
Profound stuff
A fascinating display of personal knowledge of the history of different species and their changing status in the minds of our ancestors. Excellent.
<p>Mabey is incapable of writing a tedious sentence and this book strays into as many byways as the seed of rosebay willow herb ... completely riveting ... he'
He never disappoints - buy this book for the gardener in your life, and convert them to the wonder of weeds
The best book on British wild flowers in a decade ... Read this quietly enthralling book and you will never again look at these most familiar plants in quite the same way.
This book will open your eyes to the significance, wonder and exasperation felt about weeds. I couldn'
A delightful and quietly funny read
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.
[Mabey] is the steward of a pastoral tradition in which highly personal responses to landscape are matched by expert environmental concerns; his ideas have become standard with no loss of urgency ... he deepens symbolic value by combining close attention to details with a more sweeping sense of things. In <i>Weeds</i>, Mabey has written a memorable hymn to the marginal.
A fascinating and eye-opening book, one that makes you view the world around you afresh.
A fascinating read. You read this book you will never look at weeds in quite the same way again - Richard has done them a service and us by enabling the reader to join him in this entertaining and insightful book.
The nation'
<p>Mabey'
A newish sort of nature has flourished: desolate, unruly, even rank and unwelcome, but suited to an age of ecological decline and catastrophist visions. Richard Mabey is in several senses the modest eminence behind this almost-movement ... As ever with Mabey there's a poetry to all this creeping ecology. Even the book's glossary of plant names is a verbal joy ... He'
<p>Enraptured, visionary, witty and erudite ... firmly in the Gilbert White tradition. Why, by the way, can English writers do this better than anybody else?<br><br>A fascinating read.</p>
Weaves together his unrivalled botanical knowledge with tales from history.
Mabey weaves social history, psychology, literature and art into his clear rendering of plant biology. Explanations of evolution sit alongside explorations of flower symbolism in Shakespeare.
<p>Mabey is as well versed in the literature of weeds as in the botany, richly weaving his own observations with the words of others; Shakespeare on nettles, Ruskin on poppies, Thoreau on brambles and Will Self on 'blisterweed'.<br>Mabey uses weeds as a way to explore wider ideas about the natural world and how humans interact with it ... a profound and sympathetic meditation.<br>You'
As long as humanity has tried to control nature, weeds have been our unwanted companions. In this fascinating, richly detailed book, Richard Mabey gives weeds their full due, chronicling their changing relationship to us from the ancient world to the age of invasive species and genetically modified plans. Weeds are not just a particular collection of plants, Mabey makes clear; they are, instead, a reflection of our own culture - perhaps, our own weediness.
Richard Mabey is Britain's leading natural history writer, and this is his witty and beguiling meditation on weeds and their wily ways. Mabey suggests that weeds and wild flowers, those ruthless "gatecrashers of civilization"
A witty, wise insight into the floral world and our capricious relationship with some of its more boisterous inhabitants.