Magnolia flowers have barely changed in 100 million years
Sandra Eminger/Alamy
How Flowers Made Our World
David George Haskell, Torva (UK) ; Viking (US)
Let’s get one thing clear right off the bat: I am not a green-fingered person. On the contrary, I am startlingly capable of killing even the most resilient plants, to the point that I once mismanaged a cactus to death. I am qualified to sit in a garden, but not to care for it. This review of a book about flowering plants is being written by someone who couldn’t persuade a flower to bloom if his life depended on it.
David George Haskell, on the other hand, clearly knows his flowers. Many passages in his latest book How Flowers Made Our World talk about his garden or about joining habitat restoration projects that involve planting seeds. Haskell’s love for flowers shines off the page.
Haskell is a biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and the author of several books about botany and ecology. His previous effort, Sounds Wild and Broken, was about animal songs and other sounds of the natural world, and how they are threatened by human activities such as noise pollution and deforestation.
His central argument in this latest outing is that our cultural conception of flowers is entirely wrong. In many Western societies, Haskell says, flowers are seen as “weak and merely ornamental”. They are “pretty, but not strong or in charge”.
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Flowering plants emerged during the dinosaur era and quickly became dominant
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For predictable reasons, these ideas mean flowers are also seen as “feminine”, to the point that many men will refuse alcoholic drinks that are garnished with flowers. Instead, they stick to good old manly beer, which ironically is made from flowering plants.
In fact, says Haskell, “flowers are world changers”. When flowering plants evolved and diversified, in the late dinosaur era, they radically transformed ecosystems and enabled other groups of organisms to evolve entirely new traits. Rainforests, honeybees, savannahs, meadows and our own species: all are based on flowers or depend on flowers for their survival.
To convey this, Haskell devotes eight of the book’s nine chapters to a different aspect of flowers’ biology and their importance in ecosystems. Each chapter is themed around a specific flower.
He begins with the magnolia, because magnolia flowers have barely changed in 100 million years and offer a glimpse of early flowering plants. Also known as angiosperms, flowering plants emerged during the dinosaur era – Haskell deals deftly and swiftly with the long-simmering controversy over exactly when – and quickly became dominant.
Many long-standing plant groups were pushed to the margins of ecosystems as flowering plants took over. Most of the plants we call “trees” are flowering plants. So are all grasses. As Haskell writes, “The Earth is a floral planet”.
From magnolias, Haskell moves on to goatsbeard, which exemplifies how rapidly and creatively flowering plants can evolve. The key to this, he argues, is repeated duplications of chunks of their genomes, which created a vast reservoir of genetic raw material and gave angiosperms the opportunity to evolve a host of new traits.
Meanwhile, orchids exemplify how flowering plants can form relationships with other species, from insects and birds to fungi. And seagrass illustrates how flowering plants can be ecosystems in their own right, creating havens for wildlife and reshaping their environments.
In the second half of the book, Haskell zeroes in on humanity’s relationship with flowering plants. He uses roses to discuss the incredible array of aromas produced by flowers and their importance in human relationships (and, secondarily, the perfume industry). Linnaeus developed the modern system of species classification, in part, based on his work with tea plants. Foundationally, all our major cereal crops like wheat and maize are grasses, meaning they have flowers. We could never feed our vast global population if it weren’t for these nutritious flowering plants.
There are times when, in his eagerness to drive home the significance of flowering plants, Haskell overplays his hand. He portrays the pre-angiosperm world as a drab one, with little colour (other than green) and few enticing smells. I don’t doubt that flowers added a lot of sensory excitement to the world, but visual signalling probably dates back to the first complex animals in the Cambrian: we just don’t have much information about the colours of early fish, cephalopods and aquatic plants.
Likewise, chemical communication is as old as life itself, and in the ocean it is absolutely ubiquitous, if poorly understood.
Nitpicks aside, Haskell is absolutely right to drive home the vital importance of flowering plants and the need to conserve their diversity. In his final chapters, he lucidly discusses new trends like wildflower-friendly gardens and rewilding, and explores potential futures for flowers.
My one real gripe with the book is a matter of personal preference: there is no overall narrative. Haskell is making an argument, which in its most reductive form is “flowers are cool”, and to do so he has assembled a series of loosely linked essays about different aspects of flowers. Readers should not expect to find themselves being pulled through the book by a gripping story or well-structured argument. Instead, they are encouraged to luxuriate in Haskell’s lyrical prose.
I can’t help but suspect that Haskell has been influenced by Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, in which the narrator is sent into a transportive memory by the flavour of a madeleine. Likewise, Haskell wants his readers to see tens of millions of years of evolutionary history in the petals and stamens of a magnolia.
His style of writing isn’t quite my cup of tea, or perhaps I should say my cup of steeped angiosperms. I value a direct argument or driving narrative, whereas his approach is more exploratory. But that is a personal thing. His book is deeply researched, rich with insights and often vivid – with much to recommend it.
Michael Marshall is a science writer based in Devon, UK, and author of The Genesis Quest
Three other great books on non-animal life
Thus Spoke the Plant by Monica Gagliano
Plants can “hear” caterpillars munching. Perhaps more extraordinarily, they can learn and remember. We have failed to appreciate their abilities, says Gagliano, because they operate on a different timeframe; unless we look carefully, we just don’t see what they’re up to.
Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
The idea of the “wood wide web” – a network of roots and fungi that allows trees to communicate with their neighbours – has moved from the fringes of science to cautious acceptance. It remains poorly understood, but Simard’s research is a big part of why we know about it.
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
Fungi are neither plants nor animals, but their own distinct group – perhaps the least-understood group of organisms on the planet. Yet, they are central to our lives, as Sheldrake explores here. We use them to make foods like cheese and bread, and some of them give us mind-altering experiences.
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