Product Description

Flowers bring joy and beauty to our lives, from the smallest patch of daisies outside our window to the elaborate floral decorations on display at weddings, banquets, and funerals. As well as offering aesthetic benefits, they teach us much about how the world works-each blossom is a living factory that manufactures organs and compounds ranging from the flavonoids that make a rose red to the pollen that gives us hayfever.

In The Rose's Kiss, botanist Peter Bernhardt rekindles our sense of wonder at the plant life all around us. He presents a fascinating and wide ranging look at the natural history of flowers-their forms and functions as well as their hidden interactions with the surrounding environment and the other living organisms they depend upon for survival. Using both familiar and exotic examples, he examines:

• flower architecture, including the wonderfully descriptive names of floral parts and their respective roles in a plant's life-cycle
• the secret exchange between a bud and its environment that determines blooming time and the lifespan of individual blossoms
• colors, scents, and other mechanisms that plants use to attract pollinators and keep them returning season after season
• the incredible diversity of organisms that pollinate plants-cockroaches, flies, moths, parrots, hummingbirds, bats, and others
• extinct plants and their fossil blossoms, showing the evolution of flowering plants over the past 125 million years
• and much more

Delightfully interwoven with intriguing facts and stories from history, folklore, and mythology, The Rose's Kiss is a wonderful example of literary science writing at its best. It should hold wide appeal for nature lovers, garden enthusiasts, and anyone interested in learning more about the inner workings of the natural world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1243231 in Books
• Published on: 1999-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 267 pages

From Library Journal
In this skillful blend of art, literature, science, and scholarship, BernhardtAan expert in the field of floral structure and the author of Natural Affairs: A Botanist Looks at the Attachments Between Plants and PeopleAuses the rose as a starting point to describe the anatomy, embryology, morphology, and paleobiology of plants. As in his other books, he begins each chapter with a philosophical quote, a poem, or an excerpt from a wide variety of literatures, and his presentation of botanical information is woven with stories that clarify the scientific concept. Writing not only for the botanist, Bernhardt is clear, precise, and witty. The book's current glossary of terms could be expanded, but this is still a wonderful read. Recommended for all libraries.AMichael R. Blake, Harvard Univ. Lib., Cambridge, MA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Bernhardt takes the reader on an eloquent botanical journey into the depths of plant biology, history, and research. . . . It's impossible to paraphrase this book it is so full of spark and humor and ideas."-, Audobon Naturalist News (Barbara Tufty Audobon Naturalist News )

"The author well illustrates the intimate association between plants and animals, and guides the reader through all aspects of floral biology, from details of the structure of flowers through varied pollination syndromes and insect and bird nutrition to the fossil evidence for flowers. This is the sort of book that we would all have seized upon as undergraduates."-John Akeroyd, Plant Talk (John Akeroyd Plant Talk )

"This congenial companion begins with plant anatomy and design, reveals what triggers blooming, demystifies the sexy bits, covers pollination and pollinators from bees to ants and bats to birds, then ventures back into the fossil record, all with clarity, authority and warm good humour."-Irene Wanner, Seattle Times (Irene Wanner Seattle Times )

"This entertaining new book by Peter Bernhardt is a mine of information on the natural history of flowers."-Gail Vines, New Scientist (Gail Vines New Scientist )

From the Inside Flap

Customer Reviews

An Interesting, Fun, Different, and Totally Worthwhile Read!
I'm a garden writer myself (Allergy-Free Gardening, Ten Speed Press) and I just finished reading The Rose's Kiss by Peter Bernhardt. I really enjoyed this book and was amazed at how much I learned too. I read quite a bit of botanical-based material and all too often find the writing very dry, factual but not much fun to read. This book though, is just the opposite--it is fun and totally interesting and you'll learn a great deal from it...be you a botanist, gardener, or just someone who likes to learn more about science.
Peter Bernhardt (who I don't know personally and have never met) has a deep understanding and obvious love of botany and it shows. He is also a very fine writer and he explains things so well, so clearly, that they stick in your mind. I expect that he is also a terrific teacher since he is so expert at explaining complicated material in a simple, easy to understand way. He also tosses in hundreds of fascinating little tidbits of information as he explains flowers, for this is a book about flowers, how they're formed, how they work, how they're pollinated---great section on bats and possums and other small animals that pollinate flowers.
I like too the way he explains exactly what each scientific name means and that he always gives the reader the origins of the word.
I underlined heavily my copy of The Rose's Kiss and it is a book that I'll keep going back over, reading again all the many sections I've underlined. This book was a present to me from my Dad, and I would highly recommend it as a present for anyone you care about who has more than a passing interest in botany, horticulture, life sciences, and (or) Nature and gardening. A terrific book!

Entertaining botany lesson....
Peter Bernhardt is a professor of biology associated with both the St. Louis University and the Missouri Botanical Garden of St. Louis. Although named for America's favorite flower, THE ROSE'S KISS is not dedicated exclusively to the rose. Bernhardt discusses roses throughout the book-particularly the Dog Rose which may be the grandmother of all time-and every section is headed by an epigram saluting the rose, but Bernhardt's focus is the evolution of angiosperms (flowers)-how they came into existence, how they outfoxed the gymnosperms by making themselves irresistible to pollinators, and how today they are in their glory as humans have fallen for their charms.

Hard core gardeners will love this book. Reading Bernhardt you can learn about petals, sepals, carpels and stamens and the fine art of setting seed. The book is loaded with anatomically correct illustrations of flowers and flower parts as well as pollinators and pollinator parts. Did you know, for example, that those large and beautiful colored "petals" on your wind flowers (Anemones, Clematis, Hepatica) are really sepals and not petals at all? The next time your Clematis vine produces flowers, observe the green sepals turn white or purple or pink. Other plants like the rose produce sepals that curl back and reveal true petals that open into colorful flowers.

Anyone who has gardened for a while notices that bees and butterflies seem to prefer one kind of flower over another, and that some plants produce a sweet scent while others are stinky, and some produce exorbitant amounts of pollen while others seem to produce none, and some flowers produce gobs of nectar while others appear dry. Those who have grown annuals, biennials, and perennials might wonder why some plants last one year, some two, and others go on for a time. Others might wonder why some plants have "male" and "female" versions while other plants seem to be self reliant when it comes to setting fruit. Bernhardt addresses these any many other issues concerning flowering plants.

Bernhardt says we live on a planet pollinated primarily by bees. Although humans and other animals may enjoy the honey certain kinds of bees produce, flowers depend on many different kinds of bees to set fruit. The continued existence of bees and other pollinators is dependent on environmentally sound human behavior.

Bees, Pollen and the sex lives of flowers
I love growing old roses and reading books about roses and plants every now and then. This is the best book on flowers I've read. Peter Bernhardt (no relation -- never met him) takes us from the structure of the flower, through it life cycle, into the intimate details of its sex life, and on an interesting trek through the early history of flowers (which turns out to be much longer and more interesting than I had expected). I was fascinated by the sections on pollen and how flowers produce it and get it to move from plant to plant (or keep it to themselves within the same closed flower). After reading this book I plan to redesign my garden to provide the bees with more nectar producing flowers to give then the energy they need to work the roses. Before reading The Rose's Kiss I thought that dinosaurs lived in a world without flowering plants. I was wrong. Now I am going to reread the Rose's Kiss and find a book on bees. (And a final note, this is not really a book about roses, though they are mentioned several times. It is about flowering plants of all types.)