8 Quotes by Richard Mabey

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.

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.

To be without trees would, in the most literal way, to be without our roots.

They turn up at the same time of the year, every year, like garrulous relatives you wished lived just a little further away.

Perhaps knowing one place intimately is to have a way of knowing all places.

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.

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.

Weeds are out most successful cultivated crop.