Double Flowers: The Remarkable Story of Extra-Petalled Blooms

Description from Amazon UK

Double Flowers: The Remarkable Story of Extra-Petalled Blooms Hardcover – 8 Mar 2018

Nicola Ferguson (Author)

“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 With charms extending from the romantic allure of double roses and the attention-grabbing flamboyance of double tulips to the exquisite perfection of tiny double primroses, double flowers are among the most loved of our garden plants. Double Flowers is the first popular handbook to explore them in depth. Double flowers are simply flowers with a greater than normal number of petals or petal-like structures. They occur spontaneously in the wild and can also be selected and bred. This superbly illustrated guide – begun by bestselling garden writer Nicola Ferguson before her death in 2007, and completed by Charles Quest-Ritson – celebrates some of the many thousands of beautiful double flowers produced throughout history. The book examines how doubles have arisen; how they are constructed; how and where they will flourish; their particular appeal and how best to place them in the garden; and the advantages and disadvantages of such flowers – for gardeners, for flower-arrangers and for wildlife.

Nicola Ferguson (1949-2007) was a bestselling garden writer. Her first book Right Plant, Right Place (published by Macmillan, Pan and Cassell, in succession, in the UK, and by Simon and Schuster in the US) sold more than 460,000 copies worldwide. A second bestseller, Take Two Plants (David & Charles) followed in 1998. Charles Quest-Ritson is the author of many books on gardens and gardening, including Ninfa: the Most Romantic Garden in the World (Frances Lincoln, 2009) the RHS Encyclopaedia of Roses (Dorling Kindersley, 2011) and Gardens of Germany (Mitchell Beazley, 1998). Charles Quest-Ritson lives in Hampshire.