Pollen
The Hidden Sexuality of Flowers
Rob Kesseler & Madeline Harley
Foreword by Sir Peter Crane
The extraordinary beauty and structure of pollen grains invisible to the naked eye.
200 x 220 mm
264 pages
Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-906506-51-3
£20.00
IPPY Gold Medal 2006 - Outstanding Book of the Year: Most Original Design
Subjects: Nature, Photography
First published ten years ago, this ground-breaking book is now in its fourth edition. It is the result of the shared fascination of an artist and a scientist with the perfect design of pollen grains, organisms so small that they cannot be seen without a microscope. Pollen is a unique interpretation of a magical world that no other book on the subject has ever been able to achieve.
Published in collaboration with Kew Royal Botanic Gardens.
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Rob Kesseler & Madeline Harley
Visual artist Rob Kesseler is University of the Arts London Chair in Arts, Design & Science. His long career has often used plants as a source of inspiration. In 2001 he was appointed NESTA Fellow at Kew. Since then he has worked with microscopic plant material. He was 2010 Year of Bio-Diversity Fellow at the Gulbenkian Science Institute, Portugal. His work has been shown in museums and galleries in the UK, Europe and North America, including solo exhibitions at The Victoria & Albert Museum, Kew Gardens and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon. He is a fellow of the Linnean Society and Royal Society of Arts.
Botanist Madeline Harley was, until her retirement in 2005, Head of the Pollen Research Unit at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Her research work, which is internationally recognised, is concerned mainly with the study of species-specific pollen characteristics in the field of flowering plant evolution and relationships. She has authored or co-authored more than 80 professional articles and books. She has presented her work at numerous international conferences. Dr Harley is a Fellow of the Linnean Society and holds an Honorary Research Fellowship for her work at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
"A visual feast"
Country Life
"These mere specks are gargantuan on the ultravivid pages of [this book]"
Discover
"Brilliantly conveys the beauty and amazing diversity of these commonplace yet unseen substances"
Plantlife
"Beautiful pollen grains, revealed in startling close-up"
Daily Mail
"The sex life of plants is taken far from the dry textbook and into a lush world of colour and improbably complex shapes"
BBC Wildlife Magazine
