The Secret Lives of Plants

For this month's GalaxyQ at Planet M I wrote about one of my favorite things, plants! Here's an excerpt from The Secret Lives of Flowers and Plants:

Today, giving a rose is often a public (and expensive and environmentally intensive) gesture of love. You actually want as many people as possible to know that you spent a paycheck on some flowers flown across the globe in a giant refrigerator — the ostentatiousness of it is sort of the point. But the rose has real roots as a secret messenger-slash-enforcer — the exact opposite of a public display of affection — that stretch to ancient times and back. Maybe it’s the thorns? Legend has it the Romans carved roses in walls of their dining rooms to remind guests that what happened as guests in their homes stayed in their homes. Roman mythology holds that Cupid once gave a rose to the Greek god Harpocrates (aptly, the god of silence) so he’d stay quiet about some dirt he apparently had on Venus. And sub rosa, a 17th-century Latin term that means “under the rose” still pops up in a modern court documents to indicate something that was done in secret. Lawyers love Latin.

This issue also wraps up with a feature on something else near and dear to my heart, Super Mario Bros.

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