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

How Flowers Shaped Our World
David George Haskell, Torva (UK) ; Viking (USA)

Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not a green-fingered person. On the contrary, I am surprisingly capable of killing even the most resilient plants, to the extent that I once mismanaged a cactus to death. I am fit to sit in the garden, but not to tend it. This review of a book about flowering plants is written by someone who couldn’t convince a flower to bloom if his life depended on it.

David George Haskellon the other hand, he clearly knows his flowers. Many passages in his latest book How Flowers Shaped Our World talking about his garden or getting involved in habitat restoration projects that involve planting seeds. Haskell’s love of flowers shines from the page.

Haskell is a biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and the author of several books on botany and ecology. His previous efforts, It sounds wild and brokenwas about animal songs and other sounds of nature and how they are threatened by human activities such as noise and deforestation.

His central argument in this latest outing is that our cultural understanding of flowers is completely wrong. In many Western societies, says Haskell, flowers are considered “weak and merely ornamental.” They are “pretty but not strong or commanding”.

“
Flowering plants appeared during the dinosaur era and quickly became dominant
“

For predictable reasons, these ideas mean that flowers are also seen as “feminine”, to the point that many men will reject alcoholic beverages that are decorated with flowers. Instead, they stick to good old man beer, which is paradoxically made from flowering plants.

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

To make this point, Haskell devotes eight of the book’s nine chapters to a different aspect of flower biology and their importance in ecosystems. Each chapter is thematically focused on a specific flower.

It starts with the magnolia because magnolia flowers have hardly changed in 100 million years and offer a glimpse of early blooming plants. Also known as angiosperms, flowering plants during the era of the dinosaurs – Haskell deftly and quickly emerged from the long-running dispute about 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. I know it’s all grass. As Haskell writes, “Earth is a flower planet.”

From magnolias, Haskell moves on to goat’s beard, an example of how quickly and creatively flowering plants can evolve. They argue that the key to this is the repeated duplications of chunks of their genomes, which have created a huge reservoir of genetic material and given angiosperms the opportunity to develop a range of new traits.

Meanwhile, orchids are an example of how flowering plants can form relationships with other species, from insects and birds to fungi. And seagrass shows how flowering plants can be ecosystems in their own right, creating havens for wildlife and reshaping their habitats.

In the second half of the book, Haskell focuses on humanity’s relationship with flowering plants. Using roses, he discusses the incredible range of fragrances produced by flowers and their importance in human relationships (and secondarily in the perfume industry). Linnaeus developed the modern system of species classification based in part on his work with tea plants. All of our major grains, such as wheat and corn, are basically grasses, which means they have flowers. We could never feed our huge global population if it weren’t for these nutritious flowering plants.

There are times when Haskell, in his eagerness to drive home the importance of flowering plants, exaggerates. It portrays the pre-angiosperm world as drab, with few colors (except green) and few attractive scents. I don’t doubt that flowers have given the world a lot of sensory excitement, but visual signaling probably dates back to the earliest complex animals in 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 is absolutely ubiquitous in the ocean if misunderstood.

That aside, Haskell is absolutely right about the critical importance of flowering plants and the need to preserve their diversity. In his concluding chapters, he lucidly discusses new trends such as gardens and wild flower restoration, and explores the potential future of flowers.

My only real complaint about the book is a matter of personal preference: there is no overall story. Haskell makes an argument that, at its most reductive, is “flowers are cool,” and to do so he has assembled a series of loosely connected essays on various aspects of flowers. Readers should not expect to be drawn through a book by an engaging story or a well-structured argument. Instead, they are encouraged to revel in Haskell’s lyrical prose.

I can’t help suspecting that Haskell was influenced by Marcel Proust Searching for lost timein which the narrator is sent into a madeleine-flavored transport memory. Likewise, Haskell wants his readers to see tens of millions of years of evolutionary history in magnolia petals and stems.

His writing style is not quite my cup of tea, or maybe I should say my cup of waterlogged angiosperms. I appreciate a direct argument or driving story, while his approach is more exploratory. But that’s a personal thing. Deeply researched, insightful and often lively, his book comes highly recommended.

Michael Marshall is a science writer based in Devon, UK and the author of a book The Genesis Quest

Three more great books about life outside of animals

So spoke the plant by Monica Gagliano

Plants can “hear” caterpillars chewing. Perhaps even exceptionally they can learn and remember. We haven’t been able to appreciate their abilities, says Gagliano, because they operate on a different time frame; unless we look closely, we simply cannot see what they are up to.

Searching for the mother tree by Suzanne Simard

The idea of ​​the “wood wide web”—the network of roots and fungi that allows trees to communicate with their neighbors—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 a distinct group of their own—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.

topics: