Complete your New Naturalist collection with Harper Collins's facsimile versions, which are printed on demand. The Natural History of Pollination was first published in 1996. This facsimile edition reproduces the colour plate section of the original in colour.
This is a fully updated edition of the natural history classic first published in the New Naturalist series in 1973 as The Pollination of Flowers.
The importance of insects in pollinating flowers is today so well known it's easy to forget that it was discovered little more than two centuries ago: before that, it was believed that the concern of bees with flowers was simply a matter of collecting honey.
But the methods by which pollen reaches the female flower, enabling fertilisation and seed production to take place, include some of the most varied and fascinating mechanisms in the natural world. The Natural History of Pollination describes all the ways in which pollination is brought about: by wind, water, birds, bats and even mice and rats; but principals by a great diversity of insects in an amazing range of ways, some simple, some bizarre.
The Natural History of Pollination is a unique introduction to a complex yet easily accessible subject of great fascination.
"[...] combines scholarship with lucidity, and brings innumerable fascinating details of the subject to the enthusiastic amateur as wee as the professional botanist."
– The Times Educational Supplement
"This is a great book."
– New Scientist