Your work has been described as “located between science and poetry”. Do you yourself identify these two poles in your writing, and how do you reconcile their apparent contradictions?
I don’t see a contradiction between the curiosity of science and the richness of language. Poetry can, though, touch on ethics in ways that scientific objectivity cannot.
You place great emphasis in your new book on the role played in nature by co-operation. Can you give examples?
Flowers revolutionised the world by forging new co-operative bonds. They enlisted insects as pollinators, birds as dispersers of fruit, soil microbes as mineral providers, and even humans as agricultural partners. The modern world is largely made through these bonds.
READ MORE
Is this a corrective to the emphasis, in classic Darwinism, on competition?
Yes; for over a century, biologists emphasised the competitive nature of life. We’re now learning that the way to triumph in a competitive world is not to separate into selfish individuality, but to find ways to work with others to do what neither partner can do alone.
You describe flowers as “world changers”. What does this mean?
They built most modern habitats: rainforests, prairies, seagrass, human agriculture, and more. Flowers also catalysed the evolution of animals including bees, butterflies, grazing mammals and many birds.
Has the role of flowers in evolution been underestimated, and if so, why?
Absolutely. Walk into natural history museums and you seldom see flowers get much attention. We ignore them partly because, since palaeolithic times, we’ve been much more interested in tales about fierce animals than plants.
[ How plants have evolved to fend off hungry predatorsOpens in new window ]
Darwin described the rapid development of higher plants within recent geological time as “an abominable mystery”. Have we solved this mystery?
Darwin knew nothing about genetics. We now know that genetic revolutions helped flowering plants rapidly diversify. These revolutions involve the doubling of all the DNA, then vigorous editing, allowing evolution to pick out winning innovations. These revolutions explain much of the mystery, but we don’t understand why it took evolution so long to invent flowers.
How do flowers “put the rain in rainforests”?
Through plumbing innovations. They move so much water through their bodies that they change the weather, acting as gushing conduits from the soil to the air.
Do changing pollinators change the structure of flowering plants? Or vice versa?
Many open-cupped flowers welcome any pollinator into the flower. But in other blooms, the flower’s shape matches just one animal, for example, the shape of a hummingbird’s beak. This specialisation is more efficient, but also risky. By comparing the family trees of flowering plants to those of pollinators, we can see that they each adapt to the other, a form of reciprocity.
You describe humans as a “species built by grasses”. What role did grasses play in human evolution?
Yes, we’re grass apes. Our ancestors came down from the trees to live in grasslands. Most of the food of these pre-human ancestors were either grasses, sedges, or the animals that eat these plants. Today, most of our food comes from grass – wheat, rice, maize, pasture grass, and more.
Do you believe that we have already reached a point of no return towards a hotter, dryer planet? How will plant life respond to this new world?
I don’t think there is a single point. Yes, we’re already living on a hotter, drier planet. But just how far we go down that path is up to us. Today, it is rapidly breeding plants that adapt the fastest. Fleabane, for example, has swiftly moved north through Europe and adapted to new climates. It’s slow-growing plants that will struggle the most.
By breeding flowers that we find attractive, we often produce such large and frilly blooms that no insect can use them. We also import floral beauties that have no role in local ecologies
Your hunt for flowering plants leads you under the sea. What is the role of seagrass in carbon capture and storage?
Underwater flowers! Seagrasses amaze me. They’re marine flowers, and their tough mats of roots are champions at building sediment, stabilising shores, and keeping carbon buried. Per hectare, they store 50 times more carbon than a tropical forest, and they keep it buried for millenniums.
You note that many of the plants, terrestrial and maritime, which can help us mitigate climate change are in steep decline. How can we restore them?
First, notice and celebrate them. For their utility, yes, but also their beauty. Then, tune in to context. Seagrass meadows need reseeding and less pollution. But upland grasslands might need fire. Magnolias need habitat protection. We find out and respond to these needs through lived relationship with the plants.
What role do aromas play in plant life, and how do floral aromas impact on human life and culture?
Plants “speak” in a language of hundreds of aromatic chemicals. These scents signal danger, co-ordinate flowering, and attract pollinators. We use these aromas medicinally – many aromas are antibacterial; we use them for religious ceremony – they carry our prayers; and we use them to signify personal identity in perfumes. It is strange and wonderful that we bring flowers to the centre of our lives in these ways.
“The aroma of many flowers is a compromise between sex and safety.” Explain?
Aromas attract both pollinators and plant-eating insects. If plants face too many leaf-eaters, they tone down or shut off floral perfumes. If there are few nasty munching insects around, they let loose with lots of perfume. Each flower species adapts to local conditions.
You write that “by creating experiences of beauty, flowers stitch creatures that were separate or only loosely connected into tight, intimate and creative relationships”. You clearly see beauty as a real and present factor in the evolving floral relationship with the world. How would you define it?
[ Digging into plants of the pastOpens in new window ]
Beauty is the experience evoked by the union of our senses and our knowledge of the world. For an insect, the sensory impression is the colour of petals and the scent of a flower, and knowledge is the innate understanding of which colours and scents are worth paying attention to. For humans, experiences of beauty unite senses, intellect, emotions, and cultural context. They’re moving and motivating. And potentially misleading, especially in a world where our senses seldom connect to the consequences of our actions. Beauty can be a guide or an illusion.
You relish gardens and gardening, but you see grave downsides to the floral industry as it exists today. What are these downsides, and how might they be remedied?
Gardens are places of wonderful symbiosis between flowering plants and people. Our collective love of gardening has reshaped plants. By breeding flowers that we find attractive, we often produce such large and frilly blooms that no insect can use them. We also import floral beauties that have no role in local ecologies. Also, flowers produced by the horticulture industry are often suffused with poison. By planting more local species, minimising pesticides and finding beauty in local flowers, we can restore ecological vitality.
You repeatedly suggest that plants are “active, creative agents” in evolution, that evolution is not just a blind, chance-driven process. Is this science, or poetry, or a fusion of the two?
Agency means having some control over one’s fate. Evolution gives this to plants through natural selection. The fact that the plants don’t think and plan the way we do makes them no less active participants in crafting their futures. For example, some grasses evolved leaves that are especially flammable when dried. Fire is exactly what the grasses need at the end of the season to renew their growth. I don’t intend metaphor, but description of how life works.
How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries by David George Haskell is published by Torva
