A Complex and Gorgeous Tapestry

For many years David George Haskell, whose new book is How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries, taught biology at Sewanee: The University of the South before emerging as one of the country’s leading nature writers. (He still teaches occasionally at Emory University near his Atlanta home.) Through a mixture of careful observation and extensive research, Haskell’s reflections on the natural world inevitably connect readers to deep time, to the slow course of evolution that made humans possible. By focusing on one small, typically fascinating aspect of nature, he presents Aha! moments that connect all of life. This time it’s flowers.

Haskell’s previous award-winning nonfiction includes Sounds Wild and Broken, a 2022 meditation on the sounds of nature, which was a Pulitzer finalist; The Songs of Trees (2017), in which he listened carefully to nature in various spots around the world; and his stunning first book (also a Pulitzer finalist), The Forest Unseen (2012), a naturalist’s examination of a small circle of forest in Sewanee. In all of these, as in How Flowers Made Our World, the deceptively simple analysis of individual species leads to often profound revelations.

In his preface, Haskell justifies the use of “revolutionaries” in the book’s subtitle: “Revolution is a word not often used by biologists. Evolution has wrought so many changes in three and a half billion years that those who study life’s history have a low tolerance for exaggeration. There is no formal definition, but biological ‘revolutions’ are events that set the world on entirely new courses….” He explains that the appearance of flowers a mere 200 million years ago “upended and transformed the planet,” giving us a very different sort of nature than existed in the ages before. “We live on a floral planet.”

The book explains this revolution with deep dives into eight flowering plants. He starts with one of the oldest flowers in the fossil and genetic record, the magnolia, explaining that “flowering plants took existing structures and ecological relationships and knit them in new patterns.” As in earlier works, Haskell leads the reader on sensory walks through nature, finding simple and poetic analogies for complex systems:

In any complex and gorgeous tapestry, some of the needlework is showy and obvious, and other parts are raveled or knotted below the surface. For the story of the evolution of flowering plants, magnolias are the former, plainly showing the most important converging innovation. Later, we’ll visit other flowers to find the secrets hidden in genetics and physiology. Magnolias, though, bring early flowering plant evolution to our unaided senses.

The smell of flowers, it turns out, was a key development in tricking insects and animals not to eat plants but to grow intoxicated with them, in the process supercharging their reproduction. After explaining how white flowers “the size and color of porcelain dinner plates” managed to do this in the late Cretaceous, Haskell in following chapters examines the flower secrets of goatsbeard (which he terms “a badass dandelion”), orchid, grass, seagrass (only “very distantly related” to grass on land), rose, tea, and pansy.

Like the magnolia, each of these flowers played a role in both general and human evolution. In some cases, humans went on to change the evolution of flowers, as with “doubled” petal varieties of peonies and roses, cultivated respectively in China and Rome over two thousand years ago — and now common in many species available at local garden shops. Haskell visits the culmination of human efforts to remake flowering plants at Britain’s annual Chelsea Flower Show. He offers the hopeful view “that the very fact we humans are so cleverly devoted to shaping the floral world is, potentially, a foundation of a future horticulture that more explicitly includes the needs of other species.”

He suggests that those powerful enough to create Mediterranean gardens for a one-week show in London “also have the power to build gardens that ignite local biodiversity.” The book’s final chapter, “Speculative Futures,” suggests ways this might happen, although Haskell opens with the admission, “Peeking into the floral future is a fool’s game.” Despite this, he argues passionately that “our human path does not have to be one of destruction.” After dozens of rich examples of the floral revolution explored in How Flowers Made Our World, readers may become inclined to believe Haskell’s somewhat rosy conclusion.