Among the things I promised to do in 2016 was reading longer books, as an antidote to my impatience and my growing inability to concentrate. I haven’t been doing too badly: in addition to quite a few other books, I recently finished The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan, a proper doorstopper, and I’ve just closed Richard Mabey’s The Cabaret of Plants, an eclectic collection of essays on plants and their role in the world.

It is in fact not a very long book, less than 400 pages, but it’s a slow one. Although Mabey is a journalist, his writing style is poetic and byzantine, full of obscure words* and classic quotes**. I’m obviously not a native speaker of English, but I rarely experience difficulties when reading non-fiction in that language, as my passive vocabulary is sizeable (I do most of my reading in English). This book was often a challenge, however – not only because of the author’s love for complex syntax, but because my botanical knowledge is limited. I don’t really know my elms from my ashes.

Despite these challenges – and partly because of them – it’s a rewarding book. The complexity makes it rich in meaning, but still accessible for someone for whom plants are not a ruling passion. I love the title of the book and it’s an apt one: faintly Victorian (echoing another phrase that could have been fitting, cabinet of curiosities), somewhat carnal, contradicting the view of plants as something passive and boring – all prominent themes in the book. The topics covered are wide ranging, from the 19th century obsession with ferns to the hypothetical memory of mimosa; from the extraordinary construction of baobab trees to the botanic art of the East India Company. By a happy coincidence, Mabey touches upon several of my personal obsessions: the emergence of agriculture (I find it compulsively fascinating), glasshouses, headstrong females in pursuit of strange goals, waterlilies, and the already mentioned East India Company.

The book is carried by the author’s love and respect for plants, his insight into the vegetable world and by tantalising nuggets of knowledge scattered over the pages. Which country has the biggest number of oak species? What variety of apple inspired Newton to come up with the idea of gravity? Why did Linnaeus describe one plant as ‘nine men in one bride’s chamber, with one woman’?*** But unlike in most modern bestsellers, the fascinating knowledge is not presented in neat, bite size pieces, but is happily floating around in a cocktail of philosophy, memoir and general greenery.

It’s an old-fashioned book and that’s why I recommend reading it – slowly and mindfully, maybe just a chapter at a time, when the mood is right. Or if not this one exactly, read another book like it, on something you’re interested in. This review is less about the individual specimen and more about the species. I don’t want slow books to become extinct.

* Have you ever heard the word ‘guerdon’ before?
**I suspect that familiarity with and love for the great classic English poets would add another layer of enjoyment for the reader. As even my knowledge of Keats is abysmal, I could have survived with less speculation over what his views on pollination may have been. It is, in general, a very English book, despite its reach.
*The answers are, respectively: Mexico (with 160 species); Beauty of Kent; he was describing a plant via the set-up of its sexual organs, not a huge success in the 18th century.