A few weeks earlier, I’d stumbled upon a reference in the brand new novel “Glow” (Knopf), by the literary prestidigitator Ned Beauman. The plot involves pirate radio, a paid dog-walker with a nonconforming sleep cycle, Burmese mining concessions and a poppylike psychoactive plant called “glo,” which blooms under 24-hour lights. You can probably guess how it all turns out.

When I reached him by Skype in London, Mr. Beauman, 29, confessed to a florid ignorance of practical gardening. “Actually, what I like about it is it’s so impractical,” he said of Linnaeus’s invention. “One imagines someone waking up in the middle of the night, putting on their dressing gown and then bending over in the garden and smelling the nipplewort and then saying, ‘Wow, it’s late.’ And then going back inside.”

Three authors do not make a trend. But one of these, the science writer Joshua Foer (“Moonwalking With Einstein”), did his best to cultivate one. A few years ago, Mr. Foer, 32, assembled a collection of seeds and sold out some 200 kits through Quarterly Co., a purveyor of curated packages.

Mr. Foer discovered the Horologium Florae while compiling an article for the magazine Cabinet, titled “A Minor History of Time Without Clocks.” He cited, for example, a “German woodsman’s” plan for an “ornithological clock,” following the hourly birdsong of the green chaffinch (1 to 2 a.m.), the black cap (2 to 3:30 a.m.), the hedge sparrow (2:30 to 3 a.m.), etc.

Seed packets seemed easier to ship than songbirds. “I myself can’t speak to whether this will work or not,” Mr. Foer said over the phone from his new house in Brookline Village, Mass. “I don’t have a memory of anybody writing me and saying they actually made this successfully.”

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I finally found the working innersprings for an American flower clock in a place where I often go for personal guidance: the “Transactions of the Annual Meetings of the Kansas Academy of Science.” (The publication is still in print, if you’re looking for “Observations of the Nine-Banded Armadillo in Northeastern and Central Kansas.”) There, in 1890, a botanist named B. B. Smyth published a plant list based on prairie-flower studies.

Was it reliable chronometry or more doggerel? Smyth’s obituary recounts that after a single year of college (“Michigan Normal at Ypsilanti”), he became an authority on mathematics, geology and botany. This makes him either a polymath or a prairie charlatan in the mold of the traveling professor from “The Wizard of Oz.”