Shameful plug time, with help from Live Science:

 Ah, roses. Their heady fragrance and delicate petals glistening with dew could soften the hardest heart.

But take a sharper look at the dewdrops. They bead, rather than spread—and that’s because the material composing the petal surface doesn’t bond well with water.

Yet the droplets don’t roll off. What binds them to the petals?

To find out, a team of chemists led by Lin Feng of Tsinghua University in Beijing peered at the petals with a scanning electron microscope. What they saw was a carpet of minuscule bumps covered with even tinier ridges. To confirm that those structures — and not the chemical makeup of the petals — are what grip the water droplets, Feng’s team made a plastic cast of the petal surface. As with the original petal, water droplets stuck to the cast, even when it was turned upside down.

And the plug? That gorgeous rose photograph is from my website, Photo-Roses.com