Mark Chase – författare

Orchids are elegant, exotic and mysterious. Discover 75 amazing examples in this beautiful little book.One in every seven flowering plants on earth is an orchid, and they have been around since the dinosaurs. These popular and fascinating plants have evolved to thrive in a wide variety of habitats, and come in a huge array of colours and designs – developed to ensure they are pollinated, and thus survive.Using beautifully coloured engravings, this book showcases a select few from this remarkable plant family. Featuring showy species, such as the Queen of Sheba and the spectacular big lip, as well as those with delicate petals, such as the royal butterfly and the felt orchid, this book illustrates the startling hues and striking forms that make orchids such popular plants. Ingenious flowers abound, with the vampire dragon, monkey-face and black fiddle orchids providing dramatic blooms, while several species, such as the bee orchid, are masters of mimicry, designed to fool insects into thinking they have found a mate.Get to know these fabulous flowers in this handy little book.

Although they are relative latecomers on the evolutionary scene, having emerged only 135-170 million years ago, angiosperms or flowering plants are the most diverse and species-rich group of seed-producing land plants, comprising more than 13,000 genera and over 300,000 species. Not only are they a model group for studying the patterns and processes of evolutionary diversification, outside the laboratory they also play major roles in our economy, diet, and our courtship rituals, producing our fruits, legumes, and grains, not to mention the flowers in our Valentine's bouquets. They are also crucial ecologically, dominating most terrestrial and some aquatic landscapes. This fully revised edition of Phylogeny and Evolution of the Angiosperms provides an up-to-date, comprehensive overview of the evolution of and relationships among these vital plants, as well as of our attempts to reconstruct these relationships.Incorporating molecular phylogenetics with morphological, chemical, developmental, and paleobotanical data, as well as a more detailed account of early angiosperm fossils and important fossil information for each evolutionary branch of the angiosperms, the new edition integrates fossil evidence into a robust phylogenetic framework. Also including a wealth of new color images, this highly synthetic work further reevaluates long-held evolutionary hypotheses related to flowering plants and will be an essential reference for botanists, plant systematists, and evolutionary biologists alike.