Sex in Your Garden [Paperback]

Angela Overy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 6, 1997

This book takes a clear and concise peek at the reproductive processes of garden plants and their relationship to their various pollinators. Written with a flair for the humorous and a touch of the absurd, Sex in Your Garden is the perfect addition to any gardener's or botanist's bookshelf.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Angela Overy started drawing flowers while growing up in England. Angela has worked in advertising design in London, New York, and San Francisco before settling in Colorado with her husband. She has written for the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and Fine Gardening magazine, where her own garden appeared on the cover.

Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing (January 6, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555913350
• ISBN-13: 978-1555913359
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 8.8 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #799,417 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars fantastic!, February 18, 2000

By 

Alexandra Miehlbradt (Zurich, Switzerland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sex in Your Garden (Paperback)

This book is a riot! I never knew there was so much - and so varied - sex going on in a garden. I hated botany in school because it seemed boring. But reading this book was so much fun - it made learning interesting and downright hilarious. The pictures and illustrations are fantastic and funny too. I'm not even a gardener but I loved reading this. I'd recommend it for anyone who wants to have a some good clean/dirty fun and learn something to boot. It also makes a great gift - I gave it to several friends and they all thought it was fantastic too!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars And now for something *completely* different..., August 11, 2001

By 

"vera_lynn" (Southeastern VA, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sex in Your Garden (Paperback)

This slick little piece combines the principals of successful advertising with the sensual allure of professional-quality botanical photography. The basic principal being "Sex Sells." I'm not sure I could reasonably recommend this as an educational primer --although some of this information did show up on my Bio 101 lab tests-- but it's certainly an eye-opener as a coffee-table book!

Basically, this book is a "how and why" book on plant reproduction spiced up with advertising's finest babe and hunk shots to illustrate general concepts. It does a fine job of portraying the plants in your garden as wild and raunchy, not to mention absolutely unscrupulous in the pursuit of their goals. The author, Angela Overy, is absolutely shameless in her presentation --although, for the record, she does not cross the line into pornography: The occasional bras advertisement, and a strategically placed lily on page 47, but nothing worse than what you might see between the covers of Cosmopolitan.

The book, by the way, is more an overview of propagation strategies than a detailed analysis of physiology. She does go through the naming of parts and the basics of sexual maturation in plants, but then veers off into the politics of inter-species cooperation. Namely, how plants blackmail, bribe, and proposition birds, bees, beetles, ants, slugs, and butterflies (to name a few) in order to ensure successful cross pollination.

This book covers quite a bit of ground in its own irreverent way. It's got some interesting pictures depicting the color perceptions of several common pollinators, some very interesting material on Plan B strategies for pollination, and whole lot of really fascinating trivia. The juxtaposition of perceptions about plants and human sexuality is definitely attention grabbing, but it's the captions, which range from frankly informative to ludicrously suggestive, that make this book worth the cover price.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars very amusing - a great gift, June 14, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (London) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sex in Your Garden (Paperback)

This is an amusingly written book with a catchy title. I much enjoyed the way the author writes tonge-in-cheek about plant reproduction and relating it, indirectly, to human. The illustrations and photographs are of high quality and add much to the effectiveness of the book. The content seems to me to be well researched and scientifically accurate but the treatment is light hearted. This would make an excellent gift for anyone interested in gardens and gardening.