What the Flowers Know
The creative world of flowering plants engages with other species to further its reproductive goals | Darwin’s obsession with orchids
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NOTE: Starting in June, 2023, Mother E will publish monthly on the first Sunday of each month rather than every other Sunday. After 2 and a half years of regular biweekly publishing and 60 newsletters, I’m needing to slow down to allow more time for other parts of my life, including taking care of a forest property I’ve adopted. Thank you for reading, sharing, commenting, and your overall support for these past years!
The newsletter this week is a celebration of the flowering plant world and its creative talents. Since it’s spring, I’m seeing blooming everywhere in the wild, from jolts of California poppy orange to the pulsating pink of wild rhododendron, bejeweled coastal lupin bushes, and small flower dots of yellows and purples. Life knows how to celebrate and attract. 🌺 🌼 🪻
Robin
MY FIRST GARDENING decades ago included vegetables but no cultivation of flowers. I thought I was being practical. “Grow food, not just something pretty,” I reasoned.
Of course, the plants had their own ideas. The spreading zucchini vines grew showy yellow flowers, and every fruiting vegetable or melon in the garden produced some bloom that attracted pollinators. The garden was teaching me that you can’t ignore flowers if you want food.
Flowers are relative newcomers in Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history, though. The first sign of flowering plants (called angiosperms) appeared in fossils from about 130 million years ago during the Cretaceous period, although flowers may have started earlier. What was new about these plants was that they protected their seeds within an ovary called a fruit and evolved inventive ways to attract pollinators for fertilization. The golden age of plant sex had begun.
The botanical monotony of the Jurassic world before flowers
If we could time-travel back to the Jurassic era before flowers, what would that world have looked like? You would have seen a sea of green and little variety: ferns, mosses, liverworts, cycads, ginkgoes, and some conifers—mostly plants that spread by spores.
The world before flowers was sleepier than ours because, lacking fruit and large seeds, it couldn’t support many warm-blooded creatures. Reptiles ruled, and life slowed to a crawl whenever it got cold. [...] It was a plainer-looking world, too…absent all the colors and patterns (not to mention scents) that flowers and fruits would bring into it. Beauty did not yet exist. That is, the way things looked had nothing to do with desire.
Michael Pollan The Botany of Desire
No flowers, no humans
The arrival of flowering plants brought fruits and bigger seeds, which provided the energy-producing proteins, calories, and sugars needed for mammals to thrive. Flowers had to be in place before mammals like humans could survive. Three-quarters or more of a typical human diet now comes from flowering plants like grains, peas, beans, fruits, nuts, and fruiting vegetables.
Flowers begot us, their greatest admirers
Michael Pollan
The reason for beauty
Flowers have another dimension besides producing fruits or seeds. They offer us beauty. What is the plant’s strategy behind that appeal to our senses of sight and smell?
[With flowers] the evolution of plants proceeded according to a new motive force: attraction between different species. Now natural selection favored blooms that could rivet the attention of pollinators [and] fruits that appealed to foragers.
Michael Pollan Botany of Desire
Flowering plants became creative experimenters. Since they were rooted in place, they had to attract rather than chase down what they needed. They had to learn which colors, forms, scents, or fruits attracted which insects or animals— and then make that. Their pollinators helped shape them, since life is a dance between species.
Flowering plants also had to find out which insects or animals best pollinated their flowers or spread its seeds widely. Plants started specializing in enticing the best pollinator for their shape and need.
The “bumblebee orchid” (Ophrys bombyliflora) produces a scent that mimics the sexual attractant pheromone made by the female bumblebee, luring the male bee in for pollination.
The rafflesia plant smells like rotting meat to attract its favorite pollinator—a fly.
The giant saguaro cactus blooms only at night to attract the bats that drink its nectar.
The South American passionflower has a bright bloom that is a perfect length for the SA sword-billed hummingbird.
Some hard-to-access blossoms can be pollinated only by the buzzing of a bumblebee.
Flowering plants became experts at identifying what other species wanted, mining their desires, and co-evolving with them.
Hummingbird pollinating a lily
Flowering plants drew specific birds, bees, butterflies, or moths to them. Those creatures often evolved life cycles in sync with the plants they pollinated. For example, bumblebees are born in the spring when the native flowers bloom. Climate changes are now threatening the exquisite timing of plants and pollinators.
Madame Rosa
Some flowers have specialized in attracting humans, and the rose is one of those, as it has evolved to meet human expectations. Michael Pollan writes, “The rose, flung open and ravishing in Elizabethan times, obligingly buttoned herself up and turned prim for the Victorians.”
And today, if you have leaned in to smell a florist bouquet, you’d get the message that our modern culture values sight over scent since most hybrid roses are extravagant looking but lack perfume. This might fit the commercial market, but it doesn’t please me. Nevertheless, the rose is willing to adapt and conform to growers in exchange for protection and promotion. It’s as if genus Rosa said, “You want a bigger flower or an unusual color? OK, but I’ll have to make fewer blooms and give up some scent.”
Charles Darwin’s obsession with flowers
In the late 1830s, Charles Darwin was fascinated with the wide variety of flowering plants. After his five-year world voyage serving as the HMS Beagle ship’s naturalist, he had already made his reputation as a scientist. When he returned, he developed his gardens and greenhouses into a working laboratory to study botany and flowers.
Darwin was captivated by the question of why flowers come in so many shapes, sizes, and arrangements when they’re all meant to accomplish the same thing: fertilization. […]
His most important work of botany was perhaps his 1862 book on orchids, titled On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing. In this book and others, he wrote about floral forms and cross-pollination, which would provide the rigorous experimental data that brought his theory of natural selection widespread acceptance in the scientific community. Darwin’s experiments with flowers would also lay the foundations for the nascent field of plant reproductive biology.
Flowering plants are active agents, adapting to changes, to the shifting lives of their pollinators, and to the desires of animal species like humans. Plants don’t have a centralized brain, but they do have intelligence, and it just takes a longer time span and a deeper look to see how that intelligence works.
Are you—like me—awed by the immense variety of the plant world, with its rich biochemical responses and adaptable, long-term view? Creativity is not just the domain of homo sapiens. It’s a powerful force in the zucchini plant in my garden, the dandelion, and the buzzing insects seeking sweet nectar.
Darwin recognized flowering plants as an adaptable, life-giving force. They are the great connectors of species, serving as food source, shelter, natural medicine, and, ultimately, the foundation of life for all of Earth’s creatures every day.
Robin Applegarth
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BTW: your photography is beautiful - especially if the vibrant lily! Judy
Wonderful article on flowers and will look forward to the now monthly articles to come! Judy