Flower Day: A Story of 24 Hours and 24 Floral Lives

An illustrated hourly guide that spotlights twenty-four flowers as they attract pollinators, resist predators, and survive on our changing planet.

Is it 4 AM or chicory o’clock? In this short book, botanist and award-winning author Sandra Knapp walks us through a day in a global garden. Each chapter of Flower Day introduces a single flower during a single hour, highlighting twenty-four different species from around the world.

Beginning at midnight in the Americas, we spot the long tubular flowers of the moonflower, Ipomoea alba; they attract a frenzy of hawk moths before the dawn arrives and the flowers wither and collapse. As day breaks, dandelions and chicory open their heads--actually made up of many individual flowers tightly packed together--and flies and bees visit to get the energy they need to lay eggs and raise their young. Later, at eight o’clock in the morning, the sun rises over the watery Amazon basin, and we meet the giant waterlily, slowly turning from white to pink and purple. Trapped inside are the beetles who feasted on the flowers during the night. That evening, at seven o’clock, we travel to the Caribbean to smell night-blooming jessamine’s powerful--some may say nauseating--sweet scent. But this member of the nightshade family isn’t just a thing of beauty--it has a reputation as both a poison and invasive species, crowding out endangered native trees.

For each hour in our flower day, celebrated artist Katie Scott has depicted these scenes with gorgeous pen-and-ink illustrations. Working closely together to narrate and illustrate these unique moments in time, Knapp and Scott have created an engaging read that is a perfect way to spend an hour or two--and a true gift for amateur botanists, gardeners, and anyone who wants to stop and appreciate the flowers.

Sandra Knapp is a senior research botanist at the Natural History Museum in London and Fellow of the Royal Society. She served as president of the Linnean Society from 2018-2022. She is the author of several books, including Extraordinary Orchids and In the Name of Plants, both also published by the University of Chicago Press. Katie Scott is a freelance illustrator whose work has appeared in publications including the New York Times and Nature. She has published several books, including Animalium and Botanicum.