We need to reset our relationship with nature. This book shows a way

“I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany,” the essayist Annie Dillard mused in 1974. “We know nothing for certain, but we seem to see that the world turns upon growing.” The work of the British nature writer Richard Mabey is proof of Dillard’s wisdom. He has been thinking about botany since the 1970s, when he published “Food for Free,” his classic guide to edible plants, and his interest in vegetable life has always yielded a corresponding interest in human obligations. For him, botany is both a science and an ethics, and its primary tenet is that plants are — or ought to be — our equals.

As he argues in his charming new book, “The Accidental Garden,” a garden is an especially emphatic demonstration of the collaborative nature of the human-plant relationship. “The poet R. S. Thomas once described that most commodious of institutions, the garden, as ‘a gesture against the wild/The ungovernable sea of grass,’” the book begins. “Which sounds pretty much like a summary of the whole human project on planet Earth.” It is time, Mabey proposes, for us to retire that “gesture against the wild” and learn to make cooperative overtures instead. And what better than a garden to teach us how?

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