Seeing Flowers: Discover the Hidden Life of Flowers

We've all seen red roses, blue irises, and yellow daffodils. But when we really look closely at a flower, whole new worlds of beauty and intricacy emerge.

Seeing Flowers is a visual feast that gloriously highlights 343 popular garden flowers. Using a unique photo process that includes stitching together large macro photographs, Robert Llewellyn reveals details that few have ever seen: the amazing architecture of stamens and pistils; the subtle shadings on a petal; the secret recesses of nectar tubes. Teri Dunn Chace's lyrical and illuminating essays complement these images and offer insights on each flower, by exploring its distinguishing characteristics and sharing fascinating tidbits, tales, and lore. Together, Llewellyn and Chace give the reader a deeper appreciation of how and why flowers have become so deeply embedded in human culture.

Whether you're a nature lover, a gardener, a photography buff, or someone who simply responds to the timeless beauty and variety of the floral world, Seeing Flowers will be a source of enduring delight.

Teri Dunn Chace is a writer and editor with over 30 consumer titles in publication, including The Anxious Gardener’s Book of Answers. She has also written and edited extensively for Horticulture, North American Gardener, Backyard Living, and Birds & Blooms. She lives and gardens in a small upstate New York village with snowy winters and glorious summers.Robert Llewellyn has been photographing trees and landscapes for almost forty years. His photographs have been featured in major art exhibits, and more than thirty books featuring his photography are in print.

His 2007 book, Empires of the Forest: Jamestown and the Beginning of America, won five national awards in nonfiction and photography, and his The Capital was an official diplomatic gift of the White House and State Department. Llewellyn honed his tree photography skills while working on Remarkable Trees of Virginia (2008), a four year project, creating landscape photographs that have been called "a spectacular tribute to Virginia's native trees."

Seeing Trees showcases a new form of photography, however. Using software developed for work with microscopes, Llewellyn creates incredibly sharp close-ups by stitching together 8 to 45 images of each subject #8212; each shot at a different focal point.