Artists and writers alike have always been drawn to flowers. As sources of inspiration or simple enjoyment, flowers have been responsible over the centuries for many of our greatest and most memorable works of art, works that echo and preserve — in words and in line and colour — the particular beauties of their subjects.

This volume brings together a personal selection of poetry and prose from a broad range of writers, from Shakespeare and Milton, to Reginald Farrer and Edward Augustus Bowles, to twentieth-century poets such as Marianne Moore and Theodore Roethke. Familiar wild and garden flowers are here explored in all their moods and mysteries.

The poems and extracts are illustrated with botanical prints from the remarkable collection of artworks at the Royal Horticultural Society's Lindley Library, acknowledged as the world's finest horticultural library.