Such rich, expressive writing from Richard Mabey in his book “The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination”:

Everywhere I have travelled plants have surprised me by their dogged loyalty to place, even to the point of defining the genius loci, and then by their capricious abandonment of home comforts to become vagrants, opportunists, libertines. I’ve seen ancient goblin trees develop wandering branches as promiscuous as bindweed shoots, which might equally well lope off into the countryside or jam themselves into a city wall. I’ve marvelled at tropical orchids living off air and mist. Plants, looked at like this, raise big questions about life’s constraints and opportunities — the boundaries of the individual, the nature of ageing, the significance of scale, the purpose of beauty — that seem to illuminate the processes and paradoxes of our own lives.