Green is the colour of happiness

According to this wonderfully thought-provoking book, human attachment to plants was much more evident in the 19th century than it is now. In those days people showed genuine wonder at their ‘strange existences and unquantifiable powers’, especially the British, who fashioned the most ambitious glass building of the age —the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park — drawing on the weird architecture of the amazonica lily as a blueprint.

Richard Mabey suggests that these are more prosaic times, where trees are invariably seen as primary producers, economic heavy-lifters or practical oxygen-supply operatives, or merely as a vegetative background to the planet’s real agents: ourselves and other animals. In short the green stuff is underestimated and we need to rediscover what he calls the ‘intentions, inventiveness and individualities’ of plants.

Perhaps, before dismissing our own times, we should recall a figure like Balin who, in the winter of 1996, lived up an old oak in protest against the proposed bypass around the then silently wooded outskirts of Newbury. For a fortnight he clambered about its limbs, reading Cervantes, hoping to save just one of 20,000 trees that were eventually felled, and supplying copious copy for national newspapers as they charted his primate’s progress. In the end, however, the bailiffs chainsawed his tree down and beat Balin with iron straps about the head for making them wait.

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If there are people who still cling passionately to the importance of trees then it is partly because of Mabey’s lifelong devotion to this theme. And of all his 30-plus books this is surely among his finest, an eclectic world-roaming collection of stories that evoke the extraordinary ways of the vegetable world.

He unravels the complex symbolism of Wordsworth’s daffodils, gives us a potted history of maize and its 9,000-year-long cultivation.