The neurotic rose

Professor Cleanth Penn Ransom has done the impossible: he has created a plant-animal hybrid that is part rose, part dog, and entirely uncooperative. Once eager to devour grasshoppers, the shaggy, dog-scented flower has suddenly gone on hunger strike, gnawing its support stick instead and displaying what may be a distinctly canine temperament.

Ransom insists the experiment began as scientific curiosity, but there is another motive behind his bizarre creation: a wager with the formidable chairwoman of the local flower show. If his hybrid can win a prize, he will prove that a mathematician can triumph in the botanical world—and perhaps collect an unusual reward. With a nervous champion spaniel entering treatment and a highly eccentric theory about the psychology of roses and dogs, Ransom and his colleague MacTate are drawn into an experiment where scientific ambition, wounded pride, and animal behavior become delightfully difficult to separate.