New book celebrating FRUIT
Fruit: Edible, Inedible, Incredible features a series of hyper-coloured, massively enlarged electron microscope images of fruits and the seeds they protect. A beautifully illustrated natural history of fruits, the book explains the structural reasons for the baffling diversity of fruits and illuminates the various dispersal strategies that plants have evolved over millions of years. Anybody who believed that fleshy fruits were one of nature's most wonderful gifts, simply here to provide us with sweet and healthy treats will be brutally disillusioned. As it turns out, humans are only part of an elaborate plot that manipulates us and other mammals into becoming unwitting couriers of a plant's most precious asset: its seeds.
Chinese dogwood - microscopic detail of immature fruit
Wolfgang Stuppy is a seed morphologist at Kew's Millennium Seed Bank. His work, studying the morphology and anatomy of seeds and increasing understanding of seed storage and germination, is vital to the Millennium Seed Bank’s efforts to safeguard plant species from around the globe.
Kew's Millennium Seed Bank is the largest wild plant seed bank in the world. By 2010, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and its partners in the Millennium Seed bank Project will have collected and conserved seed from 10 per cent of the world's wild flowering plant species (c.30, 000 species). The aim is to conserve 25% by 2020, however the project currently has no secured funding post 2010. Funds are being actively sought in order to continue to develop this vital work.
Cross-section of Ficus villosa, the shaggy fig
Rob Kesseler is a professor at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design. He has a long career of working with plants as a source of inspiration for his work. In 2001 he was appointed NESTA Fellow at Kew, where he has since been working with microscopic plant material. His work has been shown in museums and galleries in the United Kingdom and Europe
They have previously collaborated on the award-winning book Seeds: Time Capsules of Life (Papadakis, 2006).
