It's about the birds and the bees. Overy maintains that if you know how your plants propagate and what the propagator is, you will have a healthier garden. In a recent interview at the Denver Botanic Gardens where she teaches botanic illustration, she explained why she wrote the book. I've been teaching at the garden since 1980, teaching students how to draw flowers by taking them apart. They had no idea that plants could reproduce sexually.
Flowers are the reproductive organs of plants.
Plants need sexual partners, and their striving to attract them can be compared to human courtship. Any horticultural text, she added, will have this information, but it is presented in such a dull, pedantic way that many readers will yawn and put the book down. So Overy, who worked in advertising design in London, New York and San Francisco before settling in Denver, explains it all with gorgeous photographs and lucid, entertaining prose. With my advertising background, I looked at the way people advertised themselves or their product, and realized that there were similar instincts among people and plants. Practically everybody knows about sex.