The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination | 
#Adventathon @bookmarktavern Reading this book for #Naturalitsy, so grateful it was picked because it's an absolute delight.This bit made me laugh out loud at the strange ways we anthropomorphise other living things that are utterly indifferent to us.
pick#NaturaLitsy
This is such a beautiful book. Mabey is a prosaic nature writer who extols the complexities of the botanical world and its impact on our art, history, literature, medicine, and science.
My favourite chapters were The Cult of Celebrity, Growing Together and particularly Chiaroscoro.
5 ⭐️
pickThis month's #Naturalitsy pick led me on a journey through the world of plants and how humans have interacted with these fascinating creatures throughout history. It fell short of what I was expecting but it was a pleasant and interesting read nonetheless, and the author is simply a wonderful writer.
#WinterGames2024 #XmasChaCha +5pts
pick#ReadAway2024 #20in4 #readathon
I finished the last 40-ish pages this morning but I‘m counting it for November. Read with #Naturalitsy I really enjoyed this blend of history & science. I possess a very brown thumb but find plants fascinating & love to both look & read about them. The short Chapter 25: A Sarawakan Stinkbomb: The Titan Arum was a particular favorite as I‘m a fan of “the corpse flower” & enjoyed his focus on the bawdier side of it.
“Endemism is an ambivalent existential state. It may represent the last rites for a wild species (...) bedded down in a single vulnerable, vanishing habitat with no long-term future. Or a new stage in its evolution, as it adapts genetically to a new refuge. Endemism is still a condition through which species enter and exit the world (...)“
#Naturalitsy
#WinterGames2024 #XmasChaCha +5pts
#FirstSnowReadathon #HyggeHourReadathon
#Samphire(...) makes it's terror untenable for itself. It seemed to me to fly against every principle of evolution(...) I eventually learned that this wasn't how evolution worked outside the laboratory. Plants may be overridingly concerned w/ the survival of their own genes, but (...) none of them manipulate their habitats to ensure their own continuance over other species. That is our species' dubious perogative.“
#Naturalitsy
#NaturaLitsy
Welcome to the discussion thread for our November #buddyread for The Cabaret of Plants by Richard Mabey.
Did you enjoy the book?
Has it renewed your sense of awe and wonder at the plant kingdom?
Did you like the literary/artistic references throughout?
Did you have a particular favourite section or chapter?
Cont. ⬇️
“In the West, cognitive behaviour therapists treat tension headaches by coaching sufferers in imagining, then relaxing, the 'tight hands' round their head. Four hundred years earlier their professional forebears would have recommended doses of walnut. For better or for worse, across centuries and cultures, metaphorical images of plants and vegetation have been a fundamental ingredient in their power to heal.“
#Naturalitsy
I FINALLY have time to relax under a cozy warm blanket, with a good coffee and my #Naturalitsy book of the month.
#SaturdayChatterday
Oops, I made the graphic then forgot to post. Crazy day yesterday!
My #5JoysFriday include
1) This is a wonderful moment to stop and take measure of my week, so thank you @DebinHawaii
2) #NaturaLitsy Nov read is an absolute joy and is a new favourite.
3) Spectacular sunrises this week.
4) Excited for #MidwinterSolace
5) My beautiful mum, should have been her 76th birthday on Thursday. Gone for 21 years but never forgotten, always loved. ❤️
“The question we should ask of a myth is not whether it is true or false, whether it did or did not happen; but whether it is living or dead, whether it still carries existencial meaning for us in our time.“
#Naturalitsy
“Standing in its aqueous shade is like being inside some immense beached cetacean. Tawny owls, flocks of fieldfares, rising moons, the sentence I was mulling over as I wandered up to look at it, can vanish in a trice in its surf of flickering leaves.“
#Naturalitsy
“The coal-forest plants they were most closely related to have long vanished from the earth, and the cycads find themselves 'rare, odd, singular, anomalous, in a world of little, noisy, fast-moving animals and fast-growing, brightly coloured flowers, out of sync with their own dignified and monumental timescale'.“
#Naturalitsy
“It is as if individual trees with character and rich biographies can continue to have an existence only through the pickling(...)of their unique genetic identity; and that being carried forward by the eddying, unpredictable streams of reproduction, as all other organic life is, would obliterate their authentic essence. As a principle guiding our treatment of nature as a whole this(...)would have stopped life on earth in its tracks.“
#Naturalitsy
“I doubt there will ever be definitive answers to these questions. For many under the spell of Taxus this is not a search for the history of the yew, but for a kind of spiritual genealogy, a quest for Avalon, for the deciphering of a symbol that shows how we left the path of natural religion.“
This page is a short summary of the story of the yew, which Mabey talked in more detail throughout this chapter. It's so beautiful written!
#Naturalitsy
#NaturaLitsy
How are you getting on with our November #buddyread
This image really made me pause. The thought of such a magnificent living tree turned into a dance floor is mind-boggling. 🫣
This is a gorgeous photograph by the late Tony Evans, the photographer mentioned by Richard Mabey in the second chapter. I wish there were more of his photographs in the book (there's only one), especially some of those he talked about in depth.
But I found some of his work here: https://www.tonyevans-timelapse.com/landscape
Let me know if you find his photo of the ancient decaying pine with marigolds, I'd love to see it.
#Naturalitsy #photography
To answer my last post:
“Then he went to the moors of Inverness-shire and brought home a photograph of an ancient pine stump (...) heraldically studded with five marsh marigold flowers, kingcups rampant. They were rooted in damp crevices and pits in the rotting wood, portals into the boggy northern past, and Tony had achieved what he always insisted photography was incapable of, showing something that was not there.“
#Naturalitsy
“If photography can stop time, freeze it, representational painting contains it, not just because its making takes time, and therefore incorporates it, but because it can hint at what might have gone before and might come after. Might it be possible for the photograph of a plant to have something of this painterly quality, and record not just an isolated moment but suggest the organism's past and the invisible dynamics of its life? “
#Naturalitsy
#Hyggehour is starting to turn into #Hyggehours now that the dark, wintery nights are here. Are you extending your hour too?
Tea, toasty warm under blankets and lost in tales of discovery are the best tonic to a cold, blustery day.
@Chrissyreadit @TheBookHippie
My #weekendreads include #buddyreads for #NaturaLitsy and #hashtagbrigade plus a creepy folk horror, which I can not stop reading. 😊
@rachelsbrittain
Thank you @TheSpineView for the #Two4Tuesday tag! 🤗
1️⃣ Gonna have to go with spots but small-medium polka dot ones. 🔵
2️⃣ Yes! I have the 6 pictured currently checked out, 4 e-books & 2 print books, including the tagged. 📚
Anyone want to join in who has not yet! Consider yourself tagged! 🤗
#Naturalitsy November #buddyread
For the love of endpapers, these are magnificent 😍
🎨 Prismatic Pictures/Bridgeman Images
Joining in #5JoysFriday as I've struggled to find joy this week, like a lot of folks.
1) Rediscovering old photos back when the teens were littlies. 🥹😍
2) Taking refuge in books to hide from the real world for a bit.
3) A nice cup of coffee ☕️
4) Peace and quiet before schools out for the weekend, and we start off the weekend with a family horror movie night. 🎬
5) #NaturaLitsy Nov #buddyread is just wonderful. (Tagged)
@DebinHawaii
#Naturalitsy @alldebooks this is so fascinating. So like all art, even how we interpret cave art says more about us than about the motives of the artists
#Naturalitsy @alldebooks read the deeply charming and informative introduction and already in love with a book that starts off with Edward Lear's whimsical plants, that indicate his interest in actual botany.
Repost for @AllDebooks
#Naturalitsy
Only 2 books remaining this year!! Our November #buddyread is Mabey's The Cabaret of Plants, exploring the encounters between people and plants.
All welcome to join us. Please let me know if you wish to be added/removed from the taglist.
#Naturalitsy
Only 2 books remaining this year!! Our November #buddyread is Mabey's The Cabaret of Plants, exploring the encounters between people and plants.
All welcome to join us. Please let me know if you wish to be added/removed from the taglist.
@LitsyEvents
Thank you so much @julieclair These gifts are fantastic. The spoon is so cute and I love the candles. I have been really wanting The Cabaret of Plants and I can't wait to read it and Garden Spells.
#NaturalitsyWinterSwap #NLWS
@AllDebooks @TheBookHippie @Chrissyreadit @jenniferw88
Oooh look at what I finally hit today! Slowly but surely making my way up the Litsy Litfluence Mountain. This place is the absolute best of the entire internet. Thank you all for letting me join in on the fun! 🎉📚💜🎉
Ah, thanks for the lovely number today, my beautiful book nerds! Life would suck without you 😊
And my gift to you is a bunch of flowers pics from my mom's garden 💕🌸🌷🌺💕📚🌿📚
I don't want to read this, particularly, but I'm delighted to hear that it exists!
