Harvesting the past


Seeds, Sex and Civilization: how the hidden life of plants has shaped our


world Peter Thompson THAMES AND HUDSON, 272PP, £19.95 ■Tablet Bookshop price £18


T 01420 592974


he catchpenny title is as misleading as the art-publishing imprint and


generous layout, for this isn’t just another niche book - high concept and lowbrow, light on text and heavy on design - to reel in a science-averse public. On the contrary, it’s the science book of the year, with an insight on every page, a purringly robust prose style and an informing vision that brings together wild nature and human culture in an utterly convincing and compelling narrative. Of all the benchmark stages of human


cultural evolution – burial of the dead, brewing beer, oral language, making representative images, script, the wheel – it’s clear that saving seed for future sowing was a critical step. It marked the transition from hunter-gathering to organised agriculture, which is the socio-economic aspect of our Fall, or loss of Eden. From that moment to now, seeds have played the pivotal role in human progress: where we have lived and how survived; in what configurations – isolated farms and steadings or great cities – we have related to our fellows. It is a story so fundamental that even the science and the measured simplicity of Peter Thompson’s prose don’t mask its biblical resonances. Sex has a more than gratuitous part in it.


The ancients knew nothing of sexual reproduction in plants, even when they gazed into flower heads and saw blatantly obvious sexual organs. These seemed like nature’s joke, a kind of bawdy pun. Aristotle knew that sex was a quality only of creatures with the power of movement. Until remarkably recently, “male” and “female” were merely terms of convenience in botany, to identify flowering and fruiting aspects but with no awareness of the actual connection. Parts of Thompson’s narrative will seem familiar. Most readers will know something of Gregor Mendel’s experiments with peas,


OUR REVIEWERS Sebastian Barker is a poet.


Susan Dowell is the author of They Two Shall Be One: monogamy in history and religion.


Brian Morton writes on the arts for The Tablet.


Anthony Lejeune is The Tablet’s detective-fiction reviewer.


Terry Philpot was involved in the struggle against apartheid.


Emma Kleinwrites on Jewish affairs for The Tablet.


26 | THE TABLET | 1 January 2011


Cross-bred peas. The Natural History Museum, London


a patient (and lucky: ordinary gardeners could have told him he was storing up problems by not rotating his crop to fresh soil) research programme that was never as obscure and overlooked as is usually supposed. How many non-specialists, though, could summarise the work of Camerarius, or Koelreuter and Sprengel or Thomas Andrew Knight of Downton Castle, one of the first great selectors of fruit varieties in England and a driving force behind the Royal Horticultural Society, whose priceless notebooks were lost to posterity? Also, given our routine suspicion of Soviet science, as if it were all “Lysenkoism”, it’s good to be reminded of Nikolai Vavilov’s brilliant demonstration of genetic variation and identification of the world’s eight centres of crop origin and diversity. The best measure of Thompson’s success with his book is that his vivid portrayal of these pioneering scientists (and he spends almost as much time on Mendel’s troubled nature as on his work) is ultimately less compelling than the science itself. He has an uncanny ability to move from minute detail to broad and breathtaking generalisations that take in great sweeps of historical time. This is in keeping with the scale of seeds themselves. They can be as small as those of orchids (split and scrape a vanilla pod for a perfect example) and as a large as coconuts. These same examples also illustrate extremes of distribution and germination strategy. The coconut stoically stays afloat for months or even years to colonise a tiny atoll. Orchid seeds don’t make much evolutionary sense, lacking the wherewithal to feed themselves independently, distributing into environments where they cannot possibly grow. Much of Thompson’s early account is


taken up with demonstrating the synergy between crop selection and viability. He


shows convincingly how a wheat-growing culture (which requires large-scale planting and cooperative work) is more likely to urbanise than one (pre-Revolutionary America) which relies on maize and thus tends to be more scattered and individualistic. This has profound relevance for our growing food crisis, and while Thompson’s book isn’t in any sense a tract, it makes important interventions in the current foreign aid and genetic modification debates. Scientists like to demystify, but where a


Dawkins robs the rainbow of its magic, Thompson almost always manages to restore it. His account of germination strategies in a bluebell wood is both precise and mysterious. It won’t diminish any gasps of delight next spring; indeed, it increases the wonder. Here and elsewhere, Thompson applies a gentle common sense, born of many years’ plant collecting and researching. He reassuringly demonstrates that the Spanish bluebell, though an “alien”, represents little risk to the native variety, but he does also recognise the threat to our global botanical heritage, a recognition which lies behind Thompson’s Seed Unit at Kew, which laid the foundations for the Millennium Seed Bank and inspired such projects as the Global Seed Vault under the snow of Svalbard. Sadly, Peter Thompson didn’t live to see his book published. He died in 2008, prematurely but not before having laid away these tightly packed pages, seed pods that one hopes will germinate into fresh understanding of our remarkable and precarious interaction with the planet. Brian Morton


NOVEL OF THE WEEK Wimsey resurgent


The Attenbury Emeralds Jill Paton Walsh HODDER & STOUGHTON, 352PP, £18.99 ■Tablet Bookshop price £17.10


F 01420 592974


or a novelist to inherit characters invented by another and continue their saga is, at the very least, a challenging exercise in literary ventriloquism. Jill Paton Walsh, who has written some admirable detective stories of her own, has already proved that she can do it by completing Lord Peter Wimsey novels left unfinished or only in note form by his creator, Dorothy L. Sayers. Now she gives us a completely new Peter Wimsey tale. To make the exercise even more challenging, it begins in 1951 with Peter, aided by his valet Bunter, recounting to his wife, the former Harriet Vane, details of his first venture at detection, which took place when he was a young officer recovering from shell shock in 1921; so straight away


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