Love in the Garden

By George C. Pizzo

A garden is a peaceful, beautiful sanctuary, but beneath its serene appearance is a seething hive of sex, violence, and treachery--among its flowers and insects, that is. Based on years of voyeuristic observation, Love in the Garden reveals intricate, humorous, and often horrifying intimate details about the frenzied sexual lives of garden flowers and insects. Written with a poetic fancy and with wit, and from a shamelessly anthropomorphic viewpoint, Love in the Garden delights in the ingenuity and variety of the sexual tactics of insects and flowers. The bee orchid, for instance, attracts male bees by duplicating the scent emitted by female bees during mating season. A gullible male arrives and searches excitedly for the non-existent female opening. Then, a second male arrives, mistakes the first male for a female, and, as they wrestle and wiggle furiously, the bee orchid is pollinated. In the realm of insects, sex is often accompanied with violence and in some cases, even cannibalism. Take the notorious female praying mantis: in the midst of the sexual act, she beheads her enraptured male partner, who carries on though headless, while she devours him bite by bite. Love in the Garden does not aim to enrich the scientific knowledge of its reader. Instead, it hopes to involve the reader, through sexuality and all forms of sensation, in the turbulence of life.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080761467X
• ISBN13: 9780807614679
• Release Date: July 2000
• Publisher: George Braziller
• Length: 122 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Poetic fancy and lively wit

Ably translated by Moishe Black and Maria Green, Love In The Garden offers a poetic fancy and lively wit as Jean-Pierre Otte's presents in anthropomorphic perspective the ingenuity and variety of (...) tactics of garden insects and flowers. Otte reveals intricate, humorous, and often horrifying intimate details about the frenzied (...) lives of garden flowers and insects that enriches the scientific knowledge of the reader...

Love in the Garden

Delightful source for folklore concerning flowers! Serious and beginning gardeners will be entertained with the information discovered between the covers of this charming garden book.