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The Rose’s Kiss by Peter Bernhardt, University of Chicago Press, $16/£10.50, ISBN 0226044408

AMONG the open alpine meadows of north-western America grows a beautiful wild flower, a species of Jacob’s ladder. High in the mountains, most of its blooms have a honey-like scent, designed to attract pollinating bumblebees. Down on the shady lower slopes, however, the plants rely on flies to carry pollen from flower to flower, and there they smell like skunks.

This entertaining new book by Peter Bernhardt, professor of biology at St Louis University in Missouri, is a mine of information on the natural history of flowers. Symbols of joy, renewal, celebration and worship, these botanical marvels are also the foundation of almost every human food chain. Time we learned a bit more about them, Bernhardt reckons.

“Some people know so little about what they eat that they try to use unfamiliar plant parts in litigation,” he remarks. In The Rose’s Kiss he tells a cautionary tale about the lawyer who approached him with “something nasty” his client said she’d found in an apple pie. The foreign object turned out to be a bit of apple—the “dimple” that is all that remains of the apple blossom. Bernhardt concluded that the pie had been filled with pieces of apple, probably the common Red Delicious variety. The lawyer was disappointed, Bernhardt remembers, but luckily remained polite and promptly paid the consultation fee.