Double Flowers: The Remarkable Story of Extra-Petalled Blooms

A brilliantly readable account of double flowers, exploring everything from their many varieties to their biological development, their long history in our gardens and the powerful emotional responses they elicit. This supremely researched book will leave you appreciating double flowers as never before. - Stephen Blackmore, Queen’s Botanist and former Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh As long as there are plants and gardens, there will be plant enthusiasts who will be unable to resist what Margery Fish in A Flower for Every Day? called ‘the charm of the unusual’ and who will want to grow variations, rarities and oddities, including double flowers. Double flowers are simply flowers with a greater than normal number of petals or petal-like structures. They can occur spontaneously in the wild or can be selected and bred by humans. In this beautifully illustrated book - begun by bestselling garden writer Nicola Ferguson before her death in 2007 and completed by her friend, the writer, lecturer and photographer Charles Quest-Ritson - the author celebrates some of the many thousands of double-flowered ‘new varieties’ produced throughout history. She discusses how they have arisen; how they are constructed; how and where they will flourish; the particular charms, the advantages and disadvantages of such varieties (for gardeners, flower-arrangers and pollinators alike).