Spray of flowers, with a beetle on a stone balustrade, painted by Rachel Ruysch in 1741.Kunstmuseum Basel/Public Domain
David George Haskell’s latest book is How Flowers Made our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries. He is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Adjunct Professor at Emory University.
Floral beauty is a world-changing superpower. Flowers use beauty to link plants and animals into the collaborative unions that build and sustain much of the natural world. As blooms emerge this springtime, they connect us to one of life’s most powerful creative forces.
Flowering plants are nature’s great disruptors. They were late arrivals in evolution, appearing long after other plants and complex animals. But when they appeared about 130 million years ago, they swiftly took over and remade the world. Flowering plants built rainforests and prairies, and their grains, oils and pastures are the foundations of human agriculture. We live on a floral planet.
The floral takeover of planet Earth was a revolution enacted not by violent overthrow, but through new forms of co-operation, often mediated by beauty. A flower is a beautiful enticement for pollinators, usually insects. By speaking directly to pollinators’ senses, flowers attract and motivate their animal collaborators. Through this aesthetic connection, flowers gain reliable couriers for pollen, and animals are usually rewarded with nutritious nectar and pollen.
Caltha-leaf phacelia flowers grow along the Golden Canyon trail in Death Valley National Park, Calif., on March 6.MaKayla Hart/The Associated Press
Floral beauty is especially effective because it is multisensory. Petals act as visual beacons. Aromas advertise a flower’s location and identity. At close range, every flower has a unique electrical field, an invisible aura that bees and other insects detect with sensitive hairs. The texture and shape of flowers guide pollinators. Every part of the flower stimulates animal senses, eliciting attraction. This is ecological beauty, sensory connections binding flowers and animals into fruitful partnerships.
Today, flowers are so commonplace that we forget how radical they were at first. Until flowers evolved, insects were pests for most plants, nibbling and sucking on the leaves and stems, stealing essential nutrients. Then, flowers flipped the narrative, turning some of these former enemies into solicitous friends. By entrancing animal senses, flowers build new, mutually beneficial relationships. To this day, 90 per cent of all flowering plants are pollinated by animals, usually insects but also birds and bats. Whole dynasties of insects, most notably bees and butterflies, evolved in response to the flowers’ generous invitations to co-operation. The result of these new relationships between plants and animals was a surge in the productivity and diversity of the Earth. All this, mediated by beauty.
Illusion and deception are beauty’s shadows. Because beauty is such a powerfully motivating experience, it opens the door to exploitation. Not all flowers are kind to their pollinators. The flowers of some orchids look, smell, and feel like female wasps. Amorous males are duped into fruitless trysts. During the insects’ embrace, the orchid glues pollen sacs onto the disappointed lovers, using insect desire as a mechanism to ferry pollen from one plant to another. The male wasps get no benefit. Other flowers offer fake food, sprinkling their blooms with imitation pollen and growing spurs that look full of nectar but are empty. “Come get food!” shout the storefronts, but the shelves are bare. Some flowers drug their pollinators, spiking nectar with so much caffeine that the buzzed insects keep coming back, even when nectar and pollen run low. A few flowers, such as the Jack-in-the-pulpit wildflower common in eastern woodlands, kill their pollinators by trapping them after the insects deliver pollen. Such deceptions only work because the beauty of most flowers is honest. This opens opportunities for a small number of cheats.
Laelia orchids are seen during the National Exhibition of Orchids 'Nature Made into Art' exhibit in Guatemala City on March 12. The flowers of some orchids look, smell, and feel like female wasps.JOHAN ORDONEZ/AFP/Getty Images
We humans are not pollinators, but flowers beguile us, too. Part of this devotion is utilitarian – without the flowering plants in agriculture, most humans would starve – and some of it is motivated by beauty alone. When we perfume ourselves, give a bouquet, garland an altar, or plant flowers in gardens and window boxes, we become, like bees, floral collaborators. Flowers provide rich sensory reminders of the vitality and interconnectedness of nature. No wonder we use them to mark important connections and transitions in human life: courtship, weddings, burials and religious and secular celebrations.
To deepen our relationships with floral beauty, we’ve brought flowers into cultivation. This merger of human and botanical creativity has produced floral marvels beyond those known in nature. Divinely scented roses. Pansies with giant, colourful petals. Cherry blossoms, peonies, and carnations with ornate ruffs. As with other forms of floral beauty, this cultivation of flowers has a shadow alongside the beauty. Flowers bred to meet human aesthetic desires sometimes lack pollen and nectar, providing little benefit to pollinators. Many plants are treated with pesticides known to harm people, bees, and other species. Exotic blooms brought to our gardens from other continents often provide little benefit to local ecologies. Unlike bees, though, we can choose another way. Planting pesticide-free native flowers provides beauty and sustenance for humans and local wildlife alike, and such gardening honours the botanical heritage of our homes.
White flowers bloom and bud from a plant's twig before the start of spring at the Bois de Vincennes in eastern Paris on March 12.MARTIN LELIEVRE/AFP/Getty Images
At a time when the news is dominated by violence and ugly top-down control, it’s good to remember the wisdom of flowers, time-tested over one hundred million years. Beauty can draw together unlikely partners into productive unions. Delighting in a flower therefore gives us more than a moment of sensory pleasure. The joy we feel connects us to the ancient, productive bond between flowers and animals. This seems at first naive, a feel-good fairy tale. But in the uncompromising competition of the natural world, beauty and co-operation have, in fact, caused our world to flourish. When the flowers emerge this spring, let’s celebrate them for what they are, catalysts for positive, opportunity-building change.