For Kay Richter, my life partner, for her unfailing support, for carefully reading and commenting upon the entire manuscript and offering her insightful advice on the text and photographs, I express my profound love, respect, and heartfelt thanks. Our relationship flowered along with this book. We enjoy sharing many experiences watching bees, birds, and bats visit flowers, while often photographing them together. Please know that The Reason for Flowers would not exist, could not have been written, without your untiring love.
To my literary agent, Judith Riven, go thanks for her encouragement while developing the TRFF book proposal, contract negotiations with Scribner, and during the writing stages of this book. I thank you, Judith, for believing in me and making this book happen.
I gratefully acknowledge Colin Harrison, my editor at Scribner, for his advice, guidance, and fine editing, his devotion to the craft, and for believing in the book. Thank you, Colin. Katrina Diaz at Scribner has my thanks for her assistance with book production, along with insights about chapter frontispieces and interior art. To Dan Cuddy, our production editor, and Steve Boldt, our copy editor, I share my gratitude, along with everyone at Scribner, in producing this elegant book in a timely fashion. My sincere thanks to senior publicist Gweneth Stansfield and Kara Watson for their combined marketing acumen. I thank those individuals who kindly penned jacket blurbs for me.
I especially thank those who read the entire manuscript and offered invaluable advice. They include: Colin Harrison, Peter Bernhardt, Retha Edens-Meier, Kay Richter, David Roubik, and Judith Riven. I sincerely thank Peter Bernhardt and Retha Edens-Meier of St. Louis University for their careful reading and Beth Rashbaum for hers of the early chapters. I particularly acknowledge Peter Bernhardt and Retha Edens-Meier for their diligence in botanical fact-checking. Peter’s encyclopedic knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology, floral biology, the Australian biota, and all things botanical has been invaluable as has his collegiality as a fellow pollination biologist for many decades.
I am grateful to special-collections Missouri Botanical Gardens librarian Douglas Holland, and MOBOT itself, for digital scanning and permission to reprint the antiquarian images.
I owe many thanks to my Tucson friend, fellow Malay traveler, illustrator, and artist Paul Mirocha, for his fine flower and pollinator renderings in my books. Thanks for the Stargazer, Paul, reminding us all to keep looking up.
For mentoring during my college years, my heartfelt thanks go to Claris E. Jones Jr. (CSUF, biology) and Robbin W. Thorp (UC Davis, entomology) as my graduate advisors in pollination and bee studies. Gene, you started me along this path on a lifelong journey of floral and pollinator discovery, starting with our 1972 O.T.S. Fundamentals of Ecology course. I fondly remember the cloud forest at San Vito de Java on the Costa Rica/Panama border, although I still have not developed a fondness for peanut butter sandwiches. A special thanks to Gene Jones, Karl Niklas, Peter Bernhardt, Amots Dafni, and the late Grady Webster and Herbert and Irene Baker, for being my botanical mentors and muses over the years. To Bayard Brattstrom, I express my appreciation for his friendship, and for the use of his Kay Sonagraph, when I took my first steps listening to bees sonicate flowers.
To my fellow pollination ecologists, melittologists, artists, and writers I especially thank: David W. Roubik, John Alcock, Gary Paul Nabhan, James Cane, Bryan Danforth, the late George Eickwort, Karl J. Niklas, Laurence Packer, Terry Griswold, John Ascher, Jack Neff, Gretchen LeBuhn, Jerome G. Rozen, Ron McGinley, Charles Michener, Mike Engel, Paul Cooper, William Schaffer, George Poinar, Justin Schmidt, the late Hayward Spangler, Robert Raguso, Daniel Papaj, Judith Bronstein, Annie Leonard, Wulfila Gronenberg, Avery Russell, Jake Francis, Felicity Muth, Sophie Cardinal, Ricardo Kriebel, Diana Jolles, Diana Cohn, Thomas Seeley, Scott Camazine, Paul Mirocha, Steven Thoenes, M. K. O’Rourke, Owen K. Davis, Chris O’Toole, Joseph Scheer, Michael Wilson, and Dató Makhdzir Bin Mardan for their camaraderie over the years, and providing the personal anecdotes and published information for many of the topics that I discuss.
My thanks are extended to Luca Turin, the “emperor of scent,” for his musings on floral scents and the modern perfume industry, and for supplying us (the Gronenberg laboratory) with pure deuterated molecules for testing. Thanks to Rick Schoelhorn of Proven Winners LLC and to Jianping Ren for their insights into the world of horticultural flower breeding, methods, and field trials. A big thanks to Conrad Labandeira of the Smithsonian Institution, for information about fossilized insect pollinators and for his insights into their suspected floral relationships.
I thank the flower booth workers and shop owners whom I met and interviewed during a visit to the Los Angeles Flower Market, especially Garcia and Martin.
I am grateful to Israeli archaeologist Dani Nadel, for his friendship during a recent Tucson sabbatical visit and information on the Mt. Carmel Natufian flower burials he’s excavated. Thanks to psychologist and professor Jeannette Haviland-Jones of Rutgers, for sharing with me her published and unpublished research on the roles of flowers in keeping us mentally healthy, and smiling. I thank Rhiannon Rowlands for her comments on Greek deities and their flowers.
My sincere thanks to Hollywood film director and producer Louie Schwartzberg and line producer Grady Candler, for the opportunity to work alongside them on the Disneynature feature film Wings of Life and for Louis’s technical advice, helping me create floral time-lapse images. For pleasant Sonoran Desert interludes taking DSLR stills, and capturing other floral time-lapse sequences, I thank fellow photographers, cinematographers, and Tucsonans Keith Brust and Thomas Wiewandt, for their enduring friendships and photographic advice over the years.
I thank my partners in pollinator and flowering-plant conservation, especially Gary Paul Nabhan, Retha Edens-Meier, Laurie Adams, Paul Growald, Vicki Wojcik, Orley Taylor, Mark Moffett, Rogel Villanueva-Gutiérrez, Gordon Frankie, Gary Krupnick, Matthew Shepherd, Mace Vaughan, Peter Bernhardt, Bonnie Harper-Lore, and Peggy Olwell, for keeping me informed about what they and others are doing to conserve and protect the worlds’ flowering plants and their pollinators.
To all, and especially to those who have made important differences and contributions to my life and learning, I express my heartfelt gratitude and thanks. I can’t possibly name everyone. But, as in all efforts, a performance if you will, like the solitary endeavor of writing a nonfiction book aimed for a science-appreciative readership, any and all omissions, errors, or misstatements of facts, are entirely my own, and I take full responsibility for them. I hope you, gentle reader, are inspired to go outdoors, to appreciate and explore the largely hidden world of flowers and their animal go-betweens. Inhale deeply, while letting the flowers’ secret weapon—their beauty, forms, colors, and scents—be your guide.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge and thank my daughters, Marlyse and Melissa, for making my life complete and for our shared experiences among the ochre landscapes, native wild flowers, bees, and other pollinators of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. May you never tire of these natural splendors.