When it comes to admiring plants, flowers can hog all the attention. And though the ephemeral blooms may be dazzling, what appears after the petals fade—the fruits and seeds—are elegant in their own right.

In his new book The Hidden Beauty of Seeds & Fruits: The Botanical Photography of Levon Biss, photographer Levon Biss displays some of the striking and unusual examples of the more functional plant elements that emerge after most people have looked away. The subjects of the photographs in Biss's book come from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s carpological collection. Such repositories help scientists preserve plants to learn about how they function. Each delicate, dry and often fuzzy specimen reveals a little bit more about the range of tools life uses to persist.