Robert Mapplethorpe's Calla Lily. Andy Warhol's familiar pop-art panels filled with poppies. David LaChapelle's overblown baroque bouquets that upend the conventions of still-life composition. We're accustomed to flowers and mushrooms as seemingly trite decorative motifs, but they have also long been explored as complex subjects by some of the most radical and inventive contemporary artists.

Flowers and Mushrooms takes readers inside the rich and diverse symbolism of its eponymous subjects. Flowers have at times stood for freshness and fertility, transience and death. In...