Flowers and Their Friends

How flowers and insects came to need each other, explained to children by a teacher who refused to talk down — “it would be very stupid indeed to try to read a book written in Arabic,” she begins, so look up every word you don't know.

About the Book

1897Published
Margaret Warner MorleyAuthor
65Chapters
93Pages on this site

Margaret Warner Morley was a teacher and naturalist who wrote some of the best children's science of her era. Flowers and Their Friends (1897) is about pollination: why flowers are shaped and coloured as they are, and what the insects that visit them get out of the bargain.

Her method is to make the reader look. The book opens with a letter insisting that children look up every word they do not know, and it ends with a full glossary so that they can.

This digital edition is built from a dual-engine OCR, reconciled page by page, with the original illustrations.

This site reproduces the complete text of the original 1897 edition, digitized page by page from the original printing. The book is in the public domain.

Rights & ReuseThe complete text of Flowers and Their Friends (1897) is in the public domain in the United States — like all works published before 1928 — and is free to read, download, quote, teach from, and reuse. This digital edition (its transcription, restored images, and site design) is © 2026 PhotoOpAI, and any editorial commentary we add is clearly marked as ours; the underlying public-domain text carries no such restriction.