Richard Mabey Views
He has been called by The Times 'Britain's greatest living nature writer'[citation needed]. Among his acclaimed publications are Food for Free, The Unofficial Countryside and The Common Ground, as well as his study of the nightingale, Whistling in the Dark. His book about Gilbert White won the 1986 Whitbread Biography of the Year. Richard Mabey devised, researched and wrote the ground breaking bestseller Flora Britannica, which won the British Book Awards’ Illustrated Book of the Year and the Botanical Society of the British Isles’ President’s Award and was runner-up for the BP Natural World Book Prize.
When Papadimitriou, archivist and scavenger, a person who solicits arrest and confrontation every time he sets out to visit another decommissioned settlement, tries to make a record of the Bedford Court Estate, he carries one book as his totem. The estate is doomed, a parking lot for aircraft, but Papadimitriou, recording wild flowers, invading abandoned orchards, keeps faith with his chosen text. This is how he transcribes the episode in a contribution to the anthology London, City of Disappearances (2006): a“I first stumbled across the Bedford Court Estate during an attempt to visit Perry Oaks, a sludge-disposal works set up by the County Council in the 1930s . . . The sewage works featured in that record of urban wildlife, Richard Mabeyy’s The Unofficial Countryside . . . Mabey drew attention to the rare waders using the works as a halt on their migratory flights.i”
There's something eerie about weeds – their speed, their ingenuity, their almost supernatural resourcefulness. Shape-shifters, Richard Mabey calls them. Many of the most successful species will slide up a size or down a shade of colour if it helps ensure their survival for another generation. They'll also adapt to an astonishing level of abuse and rough treatment – the harder the better, in fact. Plantain likes to be trodden underfoot. Danish scurvy-grass thrives on the salty turbulence of motorway central reservations. Buddleia relishes vertical surfaces with no apparent soil at all: walls, car park concrete, railway bridges. Dandelions joyride in the windscreen grilles of cars and sycamores sprout in chimney pots. If it wasn't for the fact that they're plants, it would be tempting to wonder whether they have a sense of humour.
Naturally, as Richard Mabey's collaborator on Bugs Britannica I am biased, but I think this is the best book on British wild flowers in a decade. Mabey is sympathetic to these vegetable vagabonds , tattered ragamuffins of urban wastelands and broken earth. His lyrical, highly original and thought-provoking book winds along the back lanes of history as one man's crop becomes another's pest.
Richard Mabey Images
