Bloom

Published in the buildup to an election campaign fought bitterly over debates about immigration and British identity, it’s difficult not to see Ben Cave’s new book Bloom in the light of current anxieties in the UK. Taking as its subject a group of plant species now deemed to be ‘invasive non-natives’ to Great Britain, Bloom is a subtle and ambiguous examination of the ideas around indigenousness.

Bloom presents us with a kind of photographic case study of the species in question – Rhododendron, Giant Hogweed, Himalayan Balsam and Japanese Knotweed. In the landscape photographs dotted throughout this book, one or other of these plants is seen spilling over boundaries and fences, unstoppably strangling and suffocating everything in its path. The ecological language surrounding their spread, sampled in the very brief explanatory text at the beginning of this book, sits uncomfortably well alongside the current debates around immigration: ‘invasive non-natives’, ‘alien species’, ‘negative impacts’.