This book is an ambitious collaboration between Wolfgang Stuppy, seed morphologist at the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew, and Rob Kesseler, artist and professor at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. At its core, and surely the main reason most people would be tempted to buy the book, is a remarkable collection of scanning electron micrographs (SEMs) of seeds. Nearly all are not only spectacularly beautiful, but also intriguing. The papery lamellae of Delphinium peregrinum seeds (which look just like a miniature wasps' nest) surely play some role in dispersal, but how exactly? It's also clear that you couldn't appreciate how perfectly adapted to wind dispersal are the seeds of Cistanche tubulosa until you see their honeycomb seed coats. Even if you've spent your whole career working with seeds, as I have, I guarantee that you'll be amazed and captivated by some of these images.

On a purely artistic level, the collaboration between artist and scientist is a resounding success, but I wonder what the uninformed reader would make of the startling blue, pink, purple, orange and green shades that Kesseler has chosen to colour the (originally black and white) SEMs. It's only when we get to the explanatory notes at the end of the book that we learn that the images were coloured for purely artistic reasons. They certainly look dramatic, displayed against a black background, but it makes you realise that artistic impression was the primary consideration here. Choices of seeds were also largely on aesthetic grounds, although Stuppy has done an excellent job of weaving them together into a nice account of the evolution of plant reproduction, followed by a comprehensive account of the classification of seeds and fruits and their pivotal role in plant dispersal.

But there are places where I would have preferred a more organic link between text and images. Stuppy describes the remarkable hygroscopic awns of Erodium and many grasses, and their role in dispersal and burial, but none of the seeds mentioned is illustrated. Similarly, the wonderful description of the smell and taste of the durian fruit is almost enough to make you buy a plane ticket to Borneo, but wouldn't it have been great to have a picture of the fruit itself? In one or two other places, there are more serious dislocations between text and pictures. A perfectly good description of the role of elaiosomes in ant-dispersal is accompanied by two pictures of Messor, the harvester ant. But Messor is a seed predator, quite uninterested in elaiosomes, and disperses seeds only by accident (much as squirrels and jays disperse acorns).

Production values are impressive, with the whole book printed on heavy, glossy paper. But a word of warning – the glossy black backgrounds of the SEMs are easily marked by even the cleanest of fingers, so the book is best handled with kid gloves. If you buy a copy from a bookshop, make sure you get one from the bottom of the pile, away from sticky fingers. Kesseler's text is not the most felicitous, but Stuppy writes engagingly, and fortunately most of the text is his. Typos are very few, but Callitriche is water-starword, Cyclamen is twice referred to as snowbread, and Wahlenbergia has found its way into the Gentianaceae. And if you ever come across the neologism haphazardous, remember you heard it here first.