Anatomy of a Rose : The Secret Life of Flowers

by Sharman Apt Russell

A wonderfully written exploration of the sex and science of flowers, in the tradition of Anna Pavord's The Tulip and Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. An acclaimed nature writer reveals the secret life of flowers. In Anatomy of a Rose, Sharman Apt Russell eloquently unveils the "inner life" of flowers. From their diverse fragrances to their nasty deceptions, Russell proves that, where nature is concerned, 'wonder is not only our starting point, it can also be our destination.'Throughout this botanical journey, she reveals that the science behind these intelligent plants - how they evolved, how they survive, how they heal - is even more awe-inspiring than their fleeting beauty. Russell helps us imagine what a field of snapdragons looks like to a honeybee, and she introduces us to flowers that regulate their own temperature, attract pollinating bats, even smell like a rotting corpse. She also delves into cutting-edge research on everything from flower senses to their healing power.Long used to ease everything from depression to childbirth, flowers are now our main line of defence against childhood leukaemia and the deadly Ebola virus. In this wonderful book, which combines graceful writing with a scientist's clarity, Russell brings together the work of botanists around the globe, and illuminates a world at once familiar and exotic.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Nature, Biology, Gardening, Natural History, Plants

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

I am pleased to be considered a nature and science writer and excited that my Diary of a Citizen Scientist was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing. The John Burroughs Medal was first given in 1926, and recipients include Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, and many others. To be in such a list.

My most recent nonfiction is What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs (Columbia University Press, 2024)--part memoir of my tracking experiences, part introduction to the basics of identifying mammal tracks, and part call to reform how we manage wildlife in North America.

My previous Within Our Grasp: Childhood Malnutrition Worldwide and the Revolution Taking Place to End It (Pantheon Books, April, 2021) combines my longtime interest in the environment with my longtime interest in hunger. I began writing about this subject some twenty years ago, believing firmly that the goals of the environmentalist and the humanitarian are aligned. Healthy children require a healthy Earth. A healthy Earth requires healthy children.

Essentially I write about whatever interests me and seems important--living in place, grazing on public land, archaeology, flowers, butterflies, hunger, Cabeza de Vaca, citizen science, global warming, and pantheism.

I like this range of subject matter. I believe, too, in this braid of myth and science, celebration and apocalypse.

A little bit of bio:

Raised in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, in 1981 I settled in southern New Mexico as a "back to the lander" and have stayed there ever since. I am a professor emeritus in the Humanities Department at Western New Mexico University in Silver City, as well as a mentoring faculty at Antioch University in Los Angeles. I received my MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana and my B.S. in Conservation and Natural Resources from the University of California, Berkeley.

My work has been translated into Korean, Chinese, Swedish, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Polish, and Italian. That is really a unique thrill: to see your words in Chinese ideograms.

Reviews

[Rachel Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

A slim book with not a word wasted, this exploration of botany, the physics of color, and the human relationship to flowers is educational nonfiction that reads like poetry.

Absolutely gorgeous, and you don't have to have a pre-existing interest in flowers. (A pre-existing interest in excellent prose would be good.)

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

This is a weirdly kitsch yet joyous book. It bears obvious marks of having been added to my TBR during the last gasps of my bioengineering years, when I was frantically whipping my interests into fostering renewed energy for the final push into getting a degree that every inch of my bond and mind was screaming away from. The benefit of not having gotten to this book till now is knowing for certain how much was going to end up working out without in any way committing to science, so I was able to enjoy this book on its own terms rather than as a convoluted plot of self-brainwashing. As I said, the tone rides the line between inspired and saccharine pretty hard. However, there is enough science of both the wondrous and the hard-bitten sort to tide one over, and while the author certainly put out the god-with-the-capital-G out at more than one instance, it wasn't evangelizing or otherwise discomfiting. If anything, the repeated strides towards calling out global warming/climate change that concluded one of the chapters was the most uncomfortable part, if morbidly reaffirming in terms of being satisfyingly credible, of this scientific rhapsody on the subject of flowers. Throw in the fact that this "Every year is the hottest on record. Every summer has a deadly heat wave" came out in 2001, and there's another helping of doom to add to the pile. Overall, though, this was a pleasantly coiffed read that was just relevant enough to keep me engaged, yet irrelevant enough to give me an autodidactic break. All in all, if I could take a snapshot of this moment and show my 2012 self the circumstances under which he would finally be reading this, it's hardly a perfect scenario, but certainly a lot better than they would have ever imagined.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I lucked into this book after I discovered and read Ms. Russell's An Obsession With Butterflies: Our Long Love Affair With A Singular Insect. If you love flowers and bees and perfume and nature and lovely escape reading where you learn something, this book is perfect. And if you're looking for an intelligent scientific tome on nature's flowers and insects, this book is perfect as well, with an added bonus of a detailed chapter-by-chapter bibliography and index.

[Joana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes more poetic than investigative, but so much incredible information here. I learnt a lot about flowers and it made me notice them differently. If there's a desire to explore further, the author included notes with many references.

[Nestad1 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sharman Apt Russell’s novel surprised me to say the least. I expected nothing less than extremely dry 170 pages of excruciating reading, yet I actually experienced was a great basis of information on the physiology and inner workings of flowers delicately mixed into a beautiful writing style, resulting in what felt like the most poetic lecture I’ve ever received. The novel is separated in chapters based on different aspects of flowers, ranging from information on the spectrum of light all the way to the tree of life and evolutionary history. The author uses this flow of information while also connecting various personal experiences to relate the reader to the subject, a seemingly difficult task. I reached the bibliography at the end of the novel, which is well broken down by chapter, yearning for a few more pages that would leave me to ponder my relationship to this set of organisms that somehow feels so alien.
Personally, I feel that I could easily recommend this book to anyone, regardless of the amount of knowledge that they have on the topic of plant biology. The way the author conveys information on the subject seems natural and the points made by Mrs. Russell are straight forward to anyone without a biological background. With that being said, this is a must read for any student that is interested in plant biology. All topics covered by the author are relevant to coursework that would be expected of a collegiate course with such a narrow focus.

[Stanley B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

With just a few words, the author uses a poetic voice to cover botany, physics, and human relationships. The book is about color, scent, and the design of flowers and plants to assure their continued existence. She cautions against the classification of plants because it is too restrictive. This is a meditative type of non-fiction. She warns that some plants are toxic, although beautiful. Just like humanity, sometimes.

I will likely seek out her other books to read.

[Luciane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Um dos livros mais antigos que tinha ainda por ler na minha estante (acho que comprei em 2008!). Adorei a forma poética que a autora narra temas científicos para que mesmos os leigos consigam entender as plantas, para mim foi um regresso à todo o conhecimento de faculdade da cadeira de botânica (matou as saudades!).

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book about flowers can be this amusing, I didn't know. Filled with great discoveries, rich history and the writing style..! Especially the twelfth chapter. I feel like it should be read out aloud, made into a beautiful video with all the ferns, flowers, dinosaurs and the rich history of this planet mentioned in there.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like Russell's style- scientific, dramatic, and poetic! I loved learning about flowers, and this book is going to lead to further exploration. Sometimes I didn't quite follow what she was saying because of her writing style.

[James Callan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Informative with personality throughout.

Sharman Apt Russell always finds the balance between education and entertainment, science and passionate musings. One of my very favorite nature writers --writers about life throughout the taxonomic ladder.

[Mir · Rating 5 out of 5]

I truly loved the writing in this book. The author speaks through macro lenses and telescopes. I learned she is pantheist, which Margot mentioned to me when I talked with her about Atheopaganism. I’m going to earmark that for future reads.

[Estefania Pereira · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Marvin Rowe · Rating 3 out of 5]

和另一本书《种子的胜利》相比较，会更聚焦于花与花粉，读起来不如前者。光与色相关内容让人印象深刻，另外还有能大量吸收土壤重金属的、放射性物质的曼陀罗、向日葵等，大片向日葵园的下面，有可能是一个地下导弹发射井。能够了解花和她的一些知识。

[Usama Khan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very insightful read, there is literally something new to learn on every page.

[Shirley Wang · Rating 5 out of 5]

诗意的散文，但并非纯文学的作品。作者爱花，但是很明显她爱的不仅仅是花。一共 16 个章节和主题，有的描摹花朵之美、有的援引研究成果、有的回望历史长河、有的看向自然界的未来……坦白讲这本书是略略高于我目前的阅读能力的，因为起来是有一点点的费力的，有些表达，需要多想一番才能理解。但是还是读完了，毋庸置疑的五星。值得多年之后再找一个安静的夜晚读完。

[Steve Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally had an opportunity to finish a long-overdue re-read of Russell's beautifully written ode to botany. Where else could the reader learn the vagaries of pumpkin pollen?

[Eeee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book, I don’t tend to read non fiction but because of how poeticly this was written I was drawn right in

[Brenda Damen · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite parts are the descriptions of how bees see flowers, and how they see something called 'bee purple.'

[Autumn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely quick summer read on flowers blooming right now! Very informative and often poetic. Thorough range of topics on flowers and their secrets. Great set of references in the back.

[Rae]

Flowers. Pollination. Mimicry. Phytoremediation. I love Russell’s writing.

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

170 pages of poetic plant facts

[Sandy D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a rather poetically written short volume on botany - specifically, the botany of flowers. Nice chapters on scent, pollen, trapping insects, classification (a la Linnaeus), evolution, etc.

Here's a fun sentence about pollen that illustrates Russell's style:

"On the very nicest of days, when the air is slightly fresh, when the sun is pleasantly warm, when trouble-some insects have not yet appeared or are already gone, we live and breathe in an effluvia of male sex cells." (p. 93).

However, she's wrong about the pollen found on the Neandertal skeletons in Iraq....it was said in 1975 that it was evidence for burial with flowers (cited in the endnotes), but the rebuttal (from the 90's) showing that the pollen was just in the water and sediment that covered the skeletons never was as well popularized. Just FYI. Just not as cool a story as the flowers, I guess.

[Evie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting information on the secret life of flowers. Definitely opened my mind to the many facets of these fleeting beauties. The writing style can be a bit like a butterfly, flitting to and fro between subjects and focuses, but I do like the author's overall voice. She draws you into the romantic mysteries of the botanical world while still keeping a level head. This is more for a layperson, too, so if you're a professional, you might not gravitate towards this work.

Some information in here can be considered out-of-date, so make sure you follow up with other current scientific peer-reviewed resources.

[Garner Library · Rating 1 out of 5]

It was a gift, about a beloved topic, that I really wanted to like. But I couldn't. There were some good moments, but they were all too soon intruded upon by inane comments and overly personal memoir with scant connection to flowers. Perhaps retitling would clarify the content for those who love flowers, who love Botany, who love genuinely good nature writing, and who will not enjoy this book.

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the author might not describe this as a book of spiritual practice, it can orient the reader to the spiritual practice of attention and to dancing with wonder. Beautifully written, one meditation on flowers after another invites readers to a deeper appreciation of the world in which we live.

[Foxthyme · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love science and I love good writing. This book gives you both. A quote from the book: "Beloved by gardeners around the world, orchids have all the ambiance of a carnival fun house." To bugs that is. The writing is very approachable.

[Terry Ransom · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such an amazing book! Though packed with science about flowers, pollinators, and evolution, it reads like an engaging poem or romance novel. This wonderful little book gave me a new appreciation and growing wonder about our shared natural world. Very highly recommended!!!

[Jamie R · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is my bible. I carry it around with me and reread bits of it.

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a beautifully-written book about the life of flowers! All about color, scent, pollinators, in a prose that everyone who is interested in the science of plants will enjoy.

[Caitlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hate the authors writing, but if you can look past it the information about flowers is very interesting and enlightening.