What to read this week: How Flowers Made Our World by David George Haskell

How Flowers Created Our World
David George Haskell, Torva (UK); Vikings (United States)

Let’s be clear from the outset: I don’t have a green thumb. On the contrary, I am surprisingly capable of killing even the toughest plants, to the point where I once mismanaged a cactus to the point of death. I am qualified to sit in a garden, but not to take care of it. This review of a book about flowering plants is written by someone who couldn’t persuade a flower to bloom if their life depended on it.

David George Haskell, on the other hand, clearly knows his flowers. Many passages in his latest book How Flowers Created Our World talk about your garden or participate in habitat restoration projects involving planting seeds. Haskell’s love of flowers shines through on the page.

Haskell is a biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and the author of several books on botany and ecology. His previous effort, It seems wild and brokenfocused on 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 completely wrong. In many Western societies, Haskell says, flowers are considered “weak and merely ornamental.” They are “pretty, but not strong or responsible.”

For predictable reasons, these ideas also result in flowers being considered “feminine”, to the point where many men will refuse alcoholic beverages adorned with flowers. Instead, they stick to good old manly beer, which ironically is made from flowering plants.

In fact, Haskell says, “flowers change the world.” When flowering plants evolved and diversified at the end of the dinosaur era, they radically transformed ecosystems and allowed other groups of organisms to develop entirely new characteristics. Rainforests, bees, savannahs, grasslands and our own species: all rely on or depend on flowers for their survival.

To express this, Haskell devotes eight of the book’s nine chapters to a different aspect of flower biology and their importance in ecosystems. Each chapter is themed around a specific flower.

He starts 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 around the time of the dinosaurs – Haskell deftly and quickly addresses the long-standing controversy over exactly when – and quickly became dominant.

Many ancient plant groups were pushed to the margins of ecosystems as flowering plants took over. Most of the plants we call “trees” are flowering plants. The same goes for all grasses. As Haskell writes: “The Earth is a flowering planet.”

From magnolias, Haskell moves on to goat’s beard, which illustrates the speed and creativity with which flowering plants can evolve. The key to this success, he says, was the repeated duplication of pieces of their genome, which created a vast reservoir of genetic raw material and gave angiosperms the ability to evolve a multitude of new traits.

Meanwhile, orchids illustrate how flowering plants can form relationships with other species, from insects to birds to fungi. And seagrasses illustrate how flowering plants can constitute ecosystems in their own right, creating refuges for wildlife and reshaping their environments.

In the second half of the book, Haskell focuses on humanity’s relationship with flowering plants. He uses roses to evoke the incredible range of aromas produced by flowers and their importance in human relationships (and, incidentally, in the perfume industry). Linnaeus developed the modern system of species classification, based in part on his work on tea plants. Basically, all of our major grain crops like wheat and corn are grasses, which means they have flowers. We could never feed our vast global population without these nutritious flowering plants.

There are times when, in his desire to convey the importance of flowering plants, Haskell exaggerates. It depicts the pre-angiosperm world as a dull world, with few colors (other than green) and few tantalizing smells. I don’t doubt that flowers added a lot of sensory excitement to the world, but visual signaling probably dates back to the earliest complex animals of the Cambrian: we just don’t have much information about the colors of early fish, cephalopods, and aquatic plants.

Likewise, chemical communication is as old as life itself, and in the ocean it is absolutely ubiquitous, even if poorly understood.

Quibbles aside, Haskell is absolutely right to emphasize the vital importance of flowering plants and the need to conserve their diversity. In his final chapters, he lucidly discusses new trends such as wildflower-friendly gardens and rewilding, and explores the potential future of flowers.

My only real complaint with the book is a matter of personal preference: there is no overarching narrative. Haskell makes an argument that, in its most reductive form, is “flowers are cool”, and to do so he has assembled a series of loosely related essays on different aspects of flowers. Readers should not expect to find themselves drawn into the book by a gripping story or a well-structured argument. Instead, they are encouraged to luxuriate in Haskell’s lyrical prose.

I can’t help but suspect that Haskell was influenced by Marcel Proust’s speech. In search of lost timein which the narrator is sent into a transporting memory by the taste of a madeleine. Likewise, Haskell wants his readers to discover tens of millions of years of evolutionary history in the petals and stamens of a magnolia tree.

His writing style is not quite my cup of tea, or perhaps I should say my cup of soggy angiosperms. I appreciate a direct argument or driving narrative, whereas his approach is more exploratory. But it’s a personal thing. His book is deeply researched, rich in ideas and often lively – with many going for it.

Michael Marshall is a science writer based in Devon, UK, and author of The quest for Genesis

Three other great books about non-animal life

Thus spoke the plant by Monica Gagliano

Plants can “hear” caterpillars munching. Perhaps even more extraordinarily, they can learn and remember. We have failed to appreciate their capabilities, says Gagliano, because they operate on a different timetable; unless we look closely, we simply don’t see what they are doing.

Find the mother tree by Suzanne Simard

The idea of ​​the “wood network” – a network of roots and fungi that allows trees to communicate with their neighbors – has moved from the margins of science to cautious acceptance. It remains poorly understood, but Simard’s research goes a long way toward explaining why we know him.

Tangled life by Merlin Sheldrake

Fungi are neither plants nor animals, but are a 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-blowing experiences.