Le règne végétal

Collection "NRF".

Abstract: "A few brews of fern introduced into a prisoner of war camp, where for a long time now we no longer know what a blade of grass is, provoke a psychological shock and complex feelings in these men, which will be better understood once the origin of these plants has been discovered.... An exiled child enters the fantastic world of mushrooms and experiences his first revenge... In communist China, a former bourgeois and a young revolutionary forget their antagonism in front of strange plants... An aging man feels he is getting closer and closer to the stump of the tree he had cut down... As in mythology, wheat and poppies find themselves associated, friends this time, amidst the contradictions of the modern world, which take us from the fight against opium production to the war in Afghanistan . Three prisoners escape through a forest they never see the end of... Nostoc, the only land algae, is almost unknown to most people: a walker, on a rainy summer day, will find nothing less than nature's explanation for it...
The place that the vegetable sometimes occupies in our destiny and in any case in our unconscious interior life is reminded to us in the seven short stories or narratives that Pierre Gascar has grouped under the title The vegetable kingdom. The word "reign" is taken here in both senses; it designates both one of the great divisions of nature and the exercise of sovereign power".