Richard Mabey > Quotes

“To be without trees would, in the most literal way, to be without our roots.”
― Richard Mabey, Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees

“Their [cats] effortless passing between the wild and domestic worlds suggests the kind of grace we need as a species to move between nature and culture.”
― Richard Mabey, Nature Cure

“In 1546 a band of weevils were tried for damaging church vineyards in St Julien. Such trials were rife in the sixteenth century, and the distinguished French lawyer Bartholomew Chassenée rose to fame as an advocate for animals. His work is commemorated in Julian Barnes's mischievous short story 'The Wars of Religion', in which excommunication is sought for a colony of woodworm which had gnawed away the supporting legs of the Bishop of Besançon's throne, causing him to be 'hurled against his will into a state of imbecility'.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

“The wild gatecrashes our civilised domains, and the domesticated escapes and runs riot. Weeds vividly demonstrate that natural life - and the course of evolution itself - refuse to be constrained by our cultural concepts. In doing so they make us look closely at the very idea of a divided creation.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

“In New York, it’s already clear that just a few months of neglect by city maintenance teams would lead to the streets becoming a burgeoning forest of Chinese tree-of-heaven seedlings.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants

“Ever since Genesis decreed ‘thorns and thistles’ as a long-term punishment for our misbehaviour in the Garden of Eden, weeds have seemed to transcend value judgements, to be ubiquitous and self-evident, as if, like bacteria, they were a biological, not a cultural, category.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants

“Weather is a kind of Rorschach test. We see in it what we need to see, or what we feel is missing from our lives.”
― Richard Mabey, Turned Out Nice Again: Living with the Weather

“Once begun, a spell of anxiety is hard to break. The interruption of attention to the outside world creates a strange sense of unreality, of disjunction. You receive familiar images, but your concentration is elsewhere, focused inside your head. It's often described as having a glass wall between you and the world. Yet it can be a lens too. The wobble it gives to normal, unconsidered perception can lead to eerie heightenings of awareness.”
― Richard Mabey, Nature Cure

“bristly oxtongue, a weed whose scabby leaves looked as if they were afflicted by industrial acne.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

“My late friend Roger Deakin always used to excuse his failure to weed his vegetable patch by saying ‘weeds do keep the roots moist’.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants

“Ground-elder was introduced to Britain by the Romans for the commendable purpose of relieving gout, doubling as a pot-herb into the bargain. But 2,000 years and several medical revolutions later, it’s become the most obstinate and detested weed in the nation’s flowerbeds.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants

“In this litany of dereliction weeds are defined as ‘any uncultivated vegetable growth taller than nine inches’ – which makes about two-thirds of the entire United States’ indigenous flora illegal in a Houston yard.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants

“They turn up at the same time of the year, every year, like garrulous relatives you wished lived just a little further away.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

“I knew that migrant birds, crossing warring nations and increasingly unstable climate zones, had become our modern miners' canaries: they weave the world together too.”
― Richard Mabey, Nature Cure

“The elastic powers of plantain extended beyond first aid, though. It was also a divination herb, stretching sight into the future, and was used especially at that time when the membrane between the human and supernatural worlds was at its thinnest. On Midsummer Eve in Berwickshire the flowering stems were employed by young women in a charm which would predict whether they would fall in love.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants

“A wood's aura of history seems to go back not just beyond what generations of humans have done to it, but beyond civilisation altogether. The forest, the wildwood, is the nature we think we have, in both senses, 'grown out of', and in woods you have always the feel of 'going back'. They are places of long memory, and resilience.”
― Richard Mabey, Nature Cure

“Weeds vividly demonstrate that natural life – and the course of evolution itself – refuse to be constrained by our cultural concepts. In so doing they make us look closely at the very idea of a divided creation.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

“Weeds made the first vegetables, the first home medicines, the first dyes.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

“During the Second World War a giant puffball was found under an oak tree in Kent, and was suspected of being a new kind of bomb (later it was labelled ‘Hitler’s Secret Weapon’ and put on exhibition to raise funds for the war effort).”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants

“Instead, the weeds are being read as a parable, a lesson that a monolithic, oil-based urban culture is unsustainable in the twenty-first century, and that there might be other, more ecologically gentle ways of living in cities. Families too poor to buy fresh food are starting neighbourhood organic farms on the sites of demolished local blocks. Young people from all over America – musicians, Green activists, social pioneers – are flooding into the abandoned areas, keen to experiment with new patterns of urban living which accept nature – including its weedy frontiersmen – rather than attempting to drive it out. As Julien Temple, director of the remarkable TV documentary Requiem for Detroit, has written: ‘amid the ruins of the Motor City it is possible to find a first pioneer’s map to the post-industrial future that awaits us all’.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants

“Weeds – even many intrusive aliens – give something back. They green over the dereliction we have created. They move in to replace more sensitive plants that we have endangered. Their willingness to grow in the most hostile environments – a bombed city, a crack in a wall – means that they insinuate the idea of wild nature into places otherwise quite shorn of it. They are, in this sense, paradoxical. Although they follow and are dependent on human activities, their cussedness and refusal to play by our rules makes them subversive, and the very essence of wildness.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants

“The most potent protection was to employ a charm or potion based on the Anglo-Saxons’ nine sacred herbs, which included several familiar weeds: mugwort, plantain, stime (watercress), maythen (mayweed or chamomile) atterlothe (probably betony) wergulu (stinging nettle), chervil, fennel and crab apple. The fact that weeds might be simultaneously a curse and a benediction wasn’t a cause of confusion. As today, it was a matter of context. In the soil, they were trouble; in the sickroom, a cure. Their ubiquitousness and obstinate power in the fields may even have strengthened their healing image.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants

“Although they follow and are dependent on human activities, their cussedness and refusal to play by our rules makes them subversive, and the very essence of wildness.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

“However, recent research on the mechanisms of evolution is revealing adaptations which are not traceable to individual genes. It’s long been known that many plants – e.g. juniper and fat-hen – can exist in different forms in different habitats without there being any discernible genetic variation between the types. It now looks as if these ‘epigenetic’ effects can be produced in individual plants within a very few seasons or generations, by a process as simple as transplantation. Some of this adaptive behaviour is controlled by master gene complexes which are both very ancient and occur right across the living world. The large, aggressive, ‘weedy’ rosebay may in fact be the original form which developed in open and disturbed post-glacial conditions, and the smaller, daintier form an epigenetic adaptation to shade and woodland. The ancestral form was ‘switched on’ again when humans created facsimiles of the flower’s original home.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants by Richard Mabey

“What is striking in the ecological subtext of Genesis is its sense of bitterness about the arrival of agriculture. Farming here isn’t the sacrament of later Western Christianity, in which ‘to plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land’ was seen as a metaphor of God’s sowing the earth with righteousness. For at least one group of disgruntled Assyrians their farming labour seemed sufficiently cursed by literal and metaphorical weeds to be seen as a punishment or a poisoned chalice, and certainly no substitute for the freedoms of the hunter-gatherer’s life.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants

“Weeds thrive in the company of humans. They aren’t parasites, because they can exist without us, but we are their natural ecological partners, the species alongside which they do best. They relish the things we do to the soil: clearing forests, digging, farming, dumping nutrient-rich rubbish. They flourish in arable fields, battlefields, parking lots, herbaceous borders. They exploit our transport systems, our cooking adventures, our obsession with packaging. Above all they use us when we stir the world up, disrupt its settled patterns. It would be a tautology to say that these days they are found most abundantly where there is most weeding; but that notion ought to make us question whether the weeding encourages the weeds as much as vice versa.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

“Weeds are not only plants in the wrong place, but plants which have slipped into the wrong culture.”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

“We in effect challenge the unwanted prodigy to produce forms that slip through our control systems. It does not take much to beat us. One seed in a thousand may germinate later than the last hoeing, pass through the sieve intended to exclude it, show a mysterious immunity to weedkillers. The following year there are five . . .”
― Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants