“The book reads as a happy tangle of beautiful stories and studies from a career that has stepped between science and poetry, or as its subtitle says, between botany and the imagination.

[Richard] Mabey is a professional writer and has never been other than an amateur botanist. But his amateurishness, as written, has always revealed the roots of the word: to be an amateur is to be a lover, and this is the book of a man in love with both the known facts of plants and the dreams they sponsor, a man who has a microscope at home and is eager to penetrate the mysteries of vegetal life, but who is just as likely to marvel or swoon at what he finds, and wish for such softer responses to be admitted as legitimate, so to keep (in Coleridge’s phrase) the heart alive in the head.”

The above quotation is from a book review by Tim Dee of The Guardian. You can read the entire review here.