onsider the lilies of the field." The best botanical guess as to the actual variety of flower that was growing within gestural distance of Christ's sermon on a Holy Land hillside in spring is the crown anemone: its range of scarlet through purple with blue-black anthers is very like the Tyrian dyes extracted from the murex shellfish secretion that would have tinted the robes in which Solomon was arrayed in all his glory. But the subsequent bit in the Bible about the lilies "toiling not" for their regal splendour isn't right - they are gloriously suffused with red anthocyanins plus delphinidin blue at their centres only, because every plant is both a solar power station and a chemical factory. Their toil never ends; vegetation seldom vegetates.