Our Floral Planet

Welcome to our floral planet

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1:41Just heard you say it's a difficult choice. Can you repeat that and tell me why it's a difficult choice? Because I'm choosing flowers for a 20-year-old who is my grandson. And so what I'm looking for is a pleasing arrangement where the flowers look really fresh. I think I'm going to go for this white and lilac color in front of me right here. We admire flowers for their ornamental beauty, yet flowers are more than decorative blooms that provide riotous color

2:13to gardens and without which no wetting could proceed. We live on a floral planet because most of the major habitats that provide food and sustenance and climate regulation are built by flowering plants. Most of life on this planet, including us, owes its existence to flowers. They shaped evolution and we depend on them utterly for food and survival. So how does our perspective of the world change if we give flowers the credit they deserve? Welcome to Big Picture Science. I'm

2:46Mollie Bentley. The story of how nature's revolutionaries made our world will have you breathing in this episode, our floral planet.

Why we overlook flowering plants

2:54The large and charismatic animals often steal the evolutionary show. Natural history museums that feature the massive skeletons of a majestic blue whale or a snarling T-Rex in their atriums understand that size and might inspire awe. We're not surprised that these monsters of land and sea transform their environments. Swapping out the entrance hall dinosaur with a magnolia tree

3:28probably won't stop visitors in their tracks. But that's only because in most cases we've overlooked the transformative power of flowering plants. Hello, I am David George Haskell. I am a biologist and the author of How Flowers Made Our World. The celebrated biologist, professor at Emory University, an award-winning author, is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for general nonfiction. In one of those books, The Forest Unseen, he tracked a square meter of old-growth forest for over a year to see how it

4:02changed. So, suffice it to say, Dr. Haskell has patience and an eye for detail. And he invites us to cultivate and apply both to, for example, orchids, roses, tulips, hydrangea, lavender, the dogwood tree, seagrass, the crabapple, the cherry tree, and countless other flowers and flowering plants and trees. Unlike animals, flowers don't have fangs or muscles to give chase, and subduing a blossom takes only a tug of your wrist. And yet, Dr. Haskell says, flowers are one of the most powerful

4:36biological forces in Earth's history. And they change things not through predation, but through cooperation. When they emerged more than 200 million years ago, they didn't just adapt to the world, they transformed it. Call it petal power. Welcome, David Haskell. Thank you. It's a delight to be with you. I'm going to give you something, and I would like you to react as naturally as you would. So I have just received a gorgeous bouquet of flowers, a mix of flowers. I imagine these are

5:09mostly flowers that came to us from Ecuador, or perhaps even some from Europe. We've got carnations, we've got lilies, we've got some kind of crazy modified aster. Is that this one? Yes. So a lot of the flowers that we give one another as gifts now have been through these mutations that we humans have selected for and even encourage to increase the number of petals. And sometimes to the point there are some flowers in this bouquet that don't have any sexual parts left in them at all because

5:43we've changed those sexual parts into petals to satisfy our own desire for floral beauty, which is a wonderful thing. Well, David, you make the case that the Earth was forever changed by flowers. Maybe not those flowers right in front of you, but by flowers and flowering plants. So why do we typically sideline them when we describe evolution and life on this planet? We have, particularly at this point in our cultural evolution, have a bias against flowers. I think

6:14that they're pegged as pretty, they're ornamental, they're often associated with being feminine. So in a patriarchal society, that means weak and not in charge. Whereas if you look at the record of life on this planet, for hundreds of millions of years, there were lush habitats of ferns and mosses and pine trees, but none of them had flowers. And then flowers evolved. And suddenly within a few million years, they took over, those flowering plants took over most habitats, built the habitats that we have today. And yet when you go to a natural history museum, often what you see are fighting dinosaurs.

6:49And, you know, we're animals. We like that drama of one animal killing another and flowers off a different story. And one that is time-tested over, by more than 130 million years that they rebuilt the world through cooperation, mostly. Some of them are deceptive. Through expanding motherhood, through genetic flexibility, all these things that sound like aspirations, but in fact, they are, they've been tested by the rigors of natural selection as ways of transforming the world.

Defining a flower and fruit

7:18Well, maybe we should present a definition of a flower. When we talk about flowers, are we talking about flowers or flowering plants? And what is the distinction? Well, both are true. And biologists often refer to flowers to encompass both of those categories. But the flower as a sexual structure is defined by a structure that will eventually form a fruit, the ovary walls that contain the eggs and then the seeds mature into a fruit, which is a structure that no other plant on the planet makes. And before that point, often flowers have an increased

7:53advertising budget. They have petals that are bright and contrast with the foliage, and they have aromas other ways of attracting insects to them. And inside the seeds also, once those, the sexuality matures into parenthood, inside the seeds, the other defining feature of flowering plants is that they put a little food package in with the embryo that helps the seed on its way. So if you go to the market, of course, flowers are defined by their petals, their colors. Botanists tend to think of what happens

8:27next. It's the fruit and the little nutritive tissues inside the seed that are more botanically precise, because some flowering plants have lost their petals or have very small ones. They don't have aromas. And so the means by which they pollinate are very diverse, but they all mature into fruits. Well, I wonder if you can contrast that with an evergreen or with an evergreen that has a cone, for example, because they also have an aroma. And that seems like a kind of fruit, but that is a way to reproduce. What's the difference? Yeah. So technically, some flowering

9:01plants are evergreen. Like, go down to the tropical rainforest, those flowering plants are evergreen themselves. So if we think more about evergreen coniferous plants, like the pines, the hemlocks, the spruces, they're reproducing by usually separating male and female into different parts, which most flowers don't do. They put male and female together for increased efficiency. The pollen is carried by the wind. Most flowering plants don't do that. They use insects, although 10% of them, nearly 10% use wind. And then the female part of the coniferous plant

9:38often holds the little seeds in a cone. So that's protective for a while. But then the cone opens up and the seeds are sent away naked without a fruit or any kind of protective covering on them. And in fact, the technical term for the flowering plants and then some of the non-flowering plants refer to that protective tissue. Say a pine tree is a gymnosperm, which means a naked seed. And a flowering plant is an angiosperm, which means a seed contained within a vessel.

10:10And it enlists the help of other species to disperse. And we'll come to that in a moment.

Building Earth's major habitats

10:16Now, as you write, flowers were latecomers to our planet. They arrived 200 million years ago after complex animals and land plants. But within 100 million years, they had transformed the world. Can you give us an example of that? What did they do? Well, there were no tropical rainforests on this planet until flowering plants evolved. The temperate forests of the world, as we now know them with oaks and maple trees and vines and bass woods, these are all flowering plants. They often have quite small and conspicuous flowers,

10:46but they're flowering plants nonetheless. The prairies and savannas and the steppes are grasslands. And grasses are a specialized kind of flowering plant. So you've got tropical rainforests, temperate rainforests, the grasslands of the world, which now occupy 30 to 40 percent of the terrestrial land surface. And then at the edge of the oceans, salt marshes, seagrass meadows, mangroves that fringe many continents and provide incredibly important habitats. So flowering plants, in meeting their own needs and spreading around the planet, built all of these incredibly important

11:20habitats. Of course, the flowering plants did it to meet their own needs. But in doing so, they then catalyzed all kinds of biodiversity in other creatures and changed the climate and changed the oceans and changed how nutrients cycle through the ecosystem. So they really are the great innovators and disruptors on this planet. Well, now, we could probably imagine how flowering plants brought us the prairies, since the prairie grasses are a kind of flowering plant. But how did they make the rainforest? And I

11:51understand they did it by refurbishing, if that's the right word, or refashioning the water, the way that water moves through their bodies. Can you describe that for us?

Plant plumbing and rainforest creation

12:00Plumbing seems like the least interesting aspect of biology. But in fact, if you're a plant, it's really important because you've got to keep your leaves hydrated. And hydrated leaves can feast on air and sunlight. But if they're dried out, they can't. They have to shut their breathing pools. So a key thing for plants is to get water from the soil into their roots and then up through the stems and trunks out to the leaves. So you keep happy hydrated leaves. Well, flaring plants invented a new kind of plumbing within their stems that has especially wide bores so that they can move

12:37prodigious amounts of water from the roots through to the stem and up into the leaves, which keeps them well-watered. And also then, if you've got hundreds of thousands of plants doing this all at once, the amount of water vapor that they're lifting from the soil to the air is extraordinary and actually invokes its own rain. And so by changing their plumbing and moving more water from the soil to the air, these flowering plants changed the climate and created what we now call the tropical

13:07rainforests that are not just important in that they generate rainfall locally, but they change global patterns of air circulation and moisture circulation. So if the flowering plants had never evolved, we would still have plants, but it would be a very different planet, it sounds like. Can you give us a quick picture of what that would look like? There'd be some greenery. Sure. There'd be tree ferns. There would be mosses. There'd be coniferous plants and some of their relatives, seed ferns, many of which have now gone extinct. It would be very lush, very green.

13:40There would be some interesting insects, beetles and crickets and so on, but other insects would be entirely absent. So bees and butterflies, for example, evolved after flowering plants in response to the bounty provided by flowers. There would be no humans on this planet because we evolved in the grasslands or at the edge of the African grasslands. So we are a species whose evolution was catalyzed by the existence of flowering plants, both in our recent history in the last few million years,

14:10but also deeper into time. The first primates were mostly living in forests that were filled with insects and fruits and other good things to eat that were, and those forests were built by flowering plants themselves. So yes, it would be a lush place. It would be a wonderfully interesting place to visit, but it would be strangely lacking many of the species we have now. And the soundscape would be very different because if you track the evolutionary trees of sound producing animals like the birds,

14:43the crickets, other creatures that really, and the frogs that make a lot of sound, for many of them, their evolutionary tree exploded in diversity right as flowering plants were expanding. And so this, oddly, the fact that we live on a planet full of song is partly due to the fact that we have flowers. Is that a kind of conversation that these birds and bees and other insects are having with the flowering plants? Did it evolve together? There's two things. One is the flowering plants made very productive habitats, like rainforests,

15:16right, that are very lush, and that supports an enormous number of species. So just the increase in ecological productivity results in massive increases in productivity and therefore often the diversity of animals. But particularly for the insects, there's a co-evolution happening between the flowering plants and then the insects themselves. Often that co-evolution is about a chemical arms race, if you like. The flowering plants are trying to protect themselves. The caterpillars and the

15:47crickets evolve countermeasures. So back and forth they go, and that increases diversity. Happens with birds as well. You know, eight to ten percent of all birds eat nectar at some point in their life cycle. Hummingbirds, of course, are a famous example of that, but all over the world, there are other nectar-eating birds. So to a lesser extent, the diversity of birds song is also partly about co-evolution with flowers in their many forms. But the sounds are for the other like species. So the crickets are making cricket sounds for crickets, but not for the flowers themselves. They're not communicating on that level.

Listening to the buzz of pollinators

16:22Well, as far as we know, there is no communication that way. We do know, though, that some flowers are listening for the buzz of bees. So a flower is shaped a little bit like an ear, a satellite dish. So when the flower detects those vibrations of the flight of insects over the flower, the flower then responds by producing sweeter nectar. So the flowers are quite literally listening to the buzz of their pollinators and responding by providing extra inducements for them. So flowers look quiet and passive, but they're actually very actively assessing the

16:55surroundings. So in that case, the bee comes in. The flower is anticipating this or preparing the sweeter nectar for the bee. The bee gets the hit of the nectar. And while it is doing that, its legs, perhaps its wings are being covered in pollen and off it goes to pollinate the plant? Yes. And with bees, it's usually a she that is doing it because it's the male bees mostly just sit around waiting for sex, pretty much useless apart from that. And it's a sisterhood that runs the hive

17:27in most bee species. And what the bee then, often bees have very specialized structures. It's not just, they don't just get dusted with pollen. They gather the pollen into special baskets or packets. And every bee species has a different way of gathering the pollen. Some are more specialized than others. And then the bee flies off often to a flower of the same species that it just visited. So, and this is one of the great superpowers of flowers is that they convinced pollinators to be very precise. Before

18:00flowers evolved, essentially pollination involved throwing a lot of pollen out there into the world and hoping that it would land in the right place when the wind carried it. That's right. If you want to send a love letter to someone, you print a million copies, you throw them out of the window, and you hope one of these letters blows into the right place. What flowers do is they enlist couriers. So the flower from a magnolia or rose attract beetles or bees, and then that beetle or bee flies to another magnolia or rose, carrying the pollen to a very precise place exactly where it wants to go. So it's much

18:35more efficient, allows much more specialization. It allows flowers to live in places they couldn't live before. And it's as if botanical Cupid suddenly got very precise. Instead of shooting arrows blindly, Cupid suddenly is like, okay, I know how to shoot this arrow to land exactly where it needs to go. And think about, you know, an orchid in the woods. This orchid might be growing 50 meters from another orchid. Each flower is the size of my thumbnail. And the pollen, a tiny little

19:05packet of pollen is going to get from the orchid from one thumbnail to another. There are very few archers, even Olympian archers, I would imagine, that could actually hit an arrow in the right place. But the bees will do it because they visit all the moths. They will visit this one orchid and then they'll learn, oh, this was a good place to visit. I'm going to the next one and I can smell it 50 meters away. So as these flowers were evolving, they were evolving with specific species in mind, but there was this co-evolution. And does that mean that the different species of

19:38flowers were evolving to attract particular species of bees or other insects? Yes. And we can appreciate this with our unaided senses. The diversity of floral form and aroma and color that we so enjoy when you go to the florist shop or you're looking at a nature documentary or all these flowers, that diversity of form reflects diversity of relationship. So flowers like, say, the passion flowers that grow in my backyard in Atlanta, big purple flowers that

20:11are exactly the right size for a very large bumblebee to run around and pick up the pollen. Smaller bees, not so efficient. You know, hummingbird has no interest in it. Whereas other flowers like spring beauty wildflowers, which are tiny little white flowers that come out, as their name suggests, in the spring, there is a single species of tiny minor bee lives under the ground that emerges only when the spring beauties are out, pollinates that flower, and then goes back underground, lays the eggs, and that's

20:43all you see of it. And so that flower and the bee have a very tightly co-evolved relationship. And big bumblebees are of no use to that tiny little white flower. And that story is repeated in 350,000 different variations all around the world because there are 350,000, as far as we know, species of flowering plant. Each one has a slightly different relationship with this pollinator. Some of them even use the wind, as I mentioned, but a few use other animals like bats, the swarrow cacti that use

21:16bats, and some use, in southwest Australia, there's a tiny little mammal called the honey possum that goes around from flower to flower and acting just like a bee. So it's mostly insects, but there are also other creatures that are involved in this pollination relationship. I was surprised to learn that petals are modified leaves. Maybe it's so obvious that it shouldn't have surprised me, but if we look at the petals on that bouquet there, they're all different sizes, they're bright colors. How did flowers modify leaves to produce, in some cases, vibrant color?

21:50Sure. And I'm sure that there were other changes involved. And what were the other changes that were required to turn leaves into petals? Yes. Well, it isn't at all obvious, right? So a leaf is a flat photosynthetic blade, and petals take all sorts of shapes. Some of them are joined up together to make beautiful bowls or tunnels. And as you say, they're pigmented. So all of this is driven by changes in developmental genes that change the timing of when the primordium, the little group of cells that would grow into a leaf,

22:22start growing. As you change the rate of growth of different parts of that leaf, you can form a flatter structure or a rounder structure or one that's more curved. And then to produce things like aroma or to produce colors, often flowering plants took pre-existing genes, duplicated them, and then co-opted the duplicates of the gene to make a new form of pigment or to make extra aromas. But why, let's come back to color for a moment. Why so many colors? I mean, if you're in a green

22:55forest, if you're white or if you're yellow, if you have just a little bit of color, you will stand out. But for example, again, with the bouquet in front of you, that is a vibrant collection of colors. So why so many different colors? Why eye-popping colors? Well, partly it's to do with the different light environments in the world. If you're in deep shade of a forest, green and yellow and red isn't really going to work because those won't stand out. Whereas if you're in a meadow, other colors work. If you're trying to attract night-flying pollinators like

23:29moths, well, moths see white colors in the moonlight much more effectively than, say, a red, which would look about the same as a green leaf. So differences in light environment, different sensory procrivities and loves of their pollinators, best example of that are the birds. If you see a bright red flower, it's almost certain that it's pollinated by a hummingbird, or if you're not in the Americas, if you're in Australia or Africa, for example, some other bird, like a sunbird or a honey eater,

24:00birds were around probably before most flowers evolved, and they already had a love of red. And so the flowers tuned into that, and they also use it to advertise their fruits. Think of holly berries that are trying to attract the eyes of birds. So red is a good way to attract birds in. A daffodil, a rose, no matter where it grows, is such a lovely, lovesome thing.

24:38Flowers do one thing especially well to build cooperative relationships with other species, and when you hear what it is, it makes total sense. What flowers did is take that aromatic communication out into the open air and over long distances. And to do that, you've got to produce a lot of scent. What is it that the rose knows about the powers of attraction? This episode of Big Picture Science is taking in our floral planet. Quick question. If the one person who really knows your team's process called in sick tomorrow,

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The power of scent and aroma

27:19We continue our conversation with biologist David Haskell, the author of How Flowers Made Our World, about the transformative power of the petal. For anyone who's taken in the intoxicating aroma of gardenia, jasmine, or lavender, it may be no surprise to hear that scent has been one of the flowers' instrumental strategies in winning over the cooperation of other species, including us. Well, scent is one of the most ancestral communication methods for all of life. Think about

27:54little bacterial single-celled creatures swimming around in a pool. How do they communicate with one another? Often it's by releasing a chemical from one cell that drifts through the water and sends a signal to another. And that's what we're doing with aroma as well. When I smell a rose or a magnolia flower, aromatic chemicals from that other creature enter my nose, actually bind to the ends of my nerve cells and elicit a response in me. So it's the most impudent of the senses because some material part of the other creature has entered my body and is binding to me.

28:28So flowers are literally in your head. Yes. And some of them, it might even dissolve into your bloodstream, right? So that just same thing with smelling the aroma of a coffee, right? Some of that binds to your nerves and some of it dissolves probably into your blood through your lungs. Unlike sound or sight where there's an intermediary, sound waves and photons. And what flowers did is take that aromatic communication out into the open air and into over long distances. And to do that, you've got to produce a lot of scent from, because

29:02the wind is impetuous, right? You can't predict which way the wind is going to blow. If you look at a rose petal under a microscope, the top layer of cells are all lined up, these little conical cells that are filled with little drops of oil. And those are all aromatic oils. And they waft out of that top layer of cells into the air and then leave an odor plume that's like a river of scent. And when an insect finds itself in that river, it can then fly upstream to find the location. And so it's not just about

29:39finding, it's about knowing what this is. So every species of flower has a different scent profile, which allows the insects to assess from a distance, oh, this is a kind of flower that I like to work with, or this is a kind of flower that is of no interest to me whatsoever. And so there's a way in which the identity of the flower is revealed with great subtlety and precision in the way that, say, just having a, you know, white beacon of petals viewed from a distance, yeah, you can see,

30:11well, that could be one of a number of flowers. But the aroma, unmistakable, particularly for little creatures that have co-evolved with these flowers that have that scent, in a way, written into their genes to know this is the smell of home, this is a smell of good food. So that aroma is a guide, it's an identifier. And then, weirdly, because we're not flower-eating species, we eat the fruits and the seeds of flowers, and yet we are attracted to most of these. Some like the corpse flower that

30:44smells like a dead deer, and some other flowers that attract flies, and it smells like a wet dog. You know, those are not of interest to us. But others, wow, just beguiling. And so somehow written into our genes is this love, and in a way, there's need for connection to the floral world. I was going to ask why it is that we are able to enjoy the scent of flowers as we do, because they did not evolve to please us, and yet please us, they do.

31:15Yes, we are voyeurs. So the flowers are speaking to their insects, and we sort of hitchhike onto that connection. And as I said, some flowers are of no interest to us whatsoever. There are a few that are of great interest, like the jasmines and the roses of this world. And, you know, honestly, it is something of a mystery why we find that so beautiful. There are a number of different hypotheses. One is those aromas are an intensified version of the smell of healthy vegetation,

31:48which is the smell of our home place. So it's almost like an intense hit of botanical goodness that we can get in just one little huff. And I think it's no accident that the science and art of perfumery is most well-developed in places where there's been some distance put between us and botanical experience. So if we live in the city, we don't get to be around plants so much unless we go to visit one of the many beautiful parks in the city. And so we want to bring those perfumes

32:18onto our skin, into our homes, to satisfy that yearning for connection to the plant world. There's perhaps an atavistic desire to go and eat some of those flowers. Our ancestors, I mean, a lot of primates, I mean, including our close relatives, the chimpanzees, do eat flowers, particular flowers at certain times of the year. So they have in the past for our ancestors been good nutrition. And then there's this whole question of human scent. So our skin produces its own melange of aromas. And there's good psychological evidence that subconsciously,

32:54mostly, we judge one another based on those aromas. We can tell if people are anxious or neurotic or confident based on the aroma profile coming from their skin. We can also tell how genetically compatible we are in terms of the immune, my immune system compared to a potential mate's immune system. So all this stuff that we don't really think about in the conscious mind, our subconscious is assessing. And if we put floral aroma into that, it can act sometimes as a mask, but other times as an

33:26enhancement. We like the perfumed aromas that most closely match the aroma of our own skin. And paradoxically, to be more fully myself, I become a chimeric being when my scent mixes with the scent of jasmine or rose or some other botanical aroma. And in that hybrid state, I'm more fully me. And this is what flowers have been doing for all along, is turning the eye into a we. And in the simple act

33:57of putting on perfume, or using other ways of decorating ourselves with flowers, a tie with a floral motif on it, or a dress with flowers, or putting floral art in a vase on our table, or putting flowers in a painting on a wall. In all of these cases, we're expressing ourselves both individually, but also in our cultures, by reaching out to flowers to help us be more fully ourselves.

Deceit and cooperation in nature

34:24Now, you're describing the ways in which flowers are cooperative, but you did say earlier that not all of them employ this sort of gentle seduction, that some of them employ deceit, and they're ruthless. Could you give us an example of a flower that is a bit more crafty in the way that, or deceitful in the way that it lures in other animals? Yes, there are orchids in Europe that look and smell and feel just like a female wasp of a particular species. So the male wasps emerge in the springtime

34:58into a meadow filled with what they think are female wasps releasing a mating pheromone. And they think, oh, goodness me, this is, I never imagined the world would be like this. And they go and mate, try to mate with what they think are female wasps. And of course, they're wasting their time. The orchid dabs a little piece of pollen on the back of their head, and the male wasps act as couriers for the pollen, and they get nothing out of this. And these wasps only have lived for a few weeks. So it's a real cost to them. They're wasting their time. There are others, like there's a plant

35:29here in northeastern North America called the jack and jill in the pulpit. It's shaped like a vase, smells like a mushroom. Little fungus gnats, tiny little flies fly into this structure, thinking that there's going to be mushrooms in there that they can eat and lay their eggs in, but instead they pick up pollen. If they fly into a mostly male flower, they can escape and carry the pollen away. But if they fly into a flower that is all female flowers, there's no escape hole. And this vase is essentially acts as their tomb. So this is a plant that is killing its pollinators.

36:05And there are lots of other examples of flowers that pretend they've got food where they have none, or pretend that they are, well, a corpse flower is pretending to be a dead animal, but there's really no reward whatsoever for the carrion beetles and flies. So I think this is a good reminder to us not to over-allegorize the natural world, the more-than-human world. The social Darwinists used to say, nature is red in tooth and claw. It's all about individualistic competition. There are other folks

36:37who say nature is all about cooperation and symbiosis, and both are true. Ruthless competition and exploitation out there in the woods and in the prairies, but also deep, deep cooperation. And often the two go together. Parasitic animals, for example, 50% of all animals on this planet are parasites. Well, they are powered from within by tiny little mitochondria that are essentially cooperative bacteria living in their cells. So cooperation and exploitation go hand in hand.

37:11And in the tension between those two is a lot of creativity. And as a biologist and as a writer, I think this is really interesting and exciting. There isn't just one story out there in the world. There are multiple ones. And if we want to figure out human ethics, how should we run our economy? What is the right way to deal with sexuality among humans? Let's not look to the plants and the birds and the bees, because you can read any story you want out there about either exploitation or cooperation. We need to figure out how to treat one another with respect and dignity using human

37:46principles of ethics and having a human moral compass inspired by and embedded in the more than human world, but not believing that we can read little morality fairy tales out from the plants. Another thing that nature brings, and flowers in particular, is beauty to our lives. And I wonder if beauty is an evolutionary trait in itself, or is it that symmetry and the scent produced by flowers

38:16and color? Well, that just suggests good genetic fitness. Is beauty something that evolution produced?

The internal experience of beauty

38:24And do you think that bees and hummingbirds experience the beauty of flowers the way that we do? Well, most certainly they don't experience it in the way we do, because their brains and nervous systems are structured in ways that are either slightly different than ours or radically different than ours, if you're talking about, say, bees that have a whole different structure of the nervous system. But absolutely, beauty is something that manifests in the nervous systems of animals in different ways and is hugely important for evolution. That's what ties the flowers to the insects, that the flowers

39:00have figured out how to connect into the sensory proclivities and desires of insects, and then to reinforce those by giving nectar and other forms of reward, to create this aesthetic sense that leads creatures into usually cooperative unions. And then, of course, in animals, beauty has its own evolutionary trajectory. When beauty is used to mediate sexual relationships or other forms of social relationships within a species, for humans, I think beauty is all of those and is potentially also a

39:35moral guide. And this is, philosophers would say, I'm on very thin ice here, but there's a long tradition in moral philosophy of thinking about beauty as a potential moral guide. There are few things more motivating in this world than an experience where our intellect, our emotions, our senses, everything we know from our culture, all come together in one really positive experience, which is an experience of beauty. But that feels like we've moved from the world of the insects and non-human animals into the world of

40:06humans. And we know that humans experience beauty and they're motivated by it. But when you say that the insects are drawn to a flower, to a flower that we would call beautiful, they're not experiencing beauty, are they? They're experiencing maybe the excitement of the aroma because they know there are goodies. If they follow that aroma to the, to the middle of the flower, but are they experiencing, maybe not the way that we experience beauty, but are they experiencing beauty? This sort of sublime, their own kind of sublime experience?

40:37Yes. I doubt that many of them have read Immanuel Kant on the sublime, but

40:43their internal subjective experience is a mystery to us. And honestly, the internal experience of any other human is also a mystery to us. So this question of what do more than human animal species, and also plants, I would add, I mean, they could have an internal subjective experience as well, experience when, say, a bee is visiting a flower, we can imagine that. We can make physiological measurements to say that this is highly motivating. It's encoded in memory. Sometimes it's transmitted culturally within the plant, or at least through other behavioral means. So for the insects, we can

41:19measure this physiologically. We can say that the insect is highly motivated. We can see its neurons light up. We can see the insect communicate that enthusiasm to other insects, say social insects within the hive. We can even measure the fact that some of these motivations are encoded within their genes. And to me, that means that what they're receiving from their nervous system is analogous to what we are receiving from ours, right? All these inputs guiding us towards things that are good for us. Now, one hypothesis

41:57says that there are two forms of animals in this world. There are humans that have conscious experience, and there's everything else that has nervous systems very much like ours built from the same kind of material, but somehow, weirdly, they don't have this subjective internal experience. I prefer the simpler explanation, which is we are animals just like all these other creatures are. We have a different arrangement of our nervous system in some details or compared to the insects in some fundamental ways, but we're built from the same wet stuff of neurons connected to muscles, connected to sensory

42:31detectors on the surface. When we smell a flower, when we are motivated, this is what we feel. Why would we suppose that other beings are not having the same experience? Let's honor their otherness and not pretend that they're little humans running around. Surely a bee and a hummingbird are experiencing the world if they have a subjective experience in it with a different texture, a different tempo, a different set of internal arrangements than we are. But to say that they are sort of machine

43:04like boxes with nothing going on internally to them feels to me like completely divergent from a Darwinian understanding of the world. Well, here's an example of a flowering tree that hasn't changed much in many millions of years, and it's one that you're well familiar with in Georgia. It's a tree that has taken this flowering strategy and has gone all out with it. And for your reference, I think this is a saucer magnolia or perhaps a tulip magnolia, I believe. So David,

43:35if you were to visit our house in May, you'd admire this green tree with these muscular branches, but you won't find a single flower on it. If you visit a few weeks earlier in April during this very short window, you can't believe you're looking at the same tree. And I think you, as you're nodding along, I think you know why. And what happens during those three weeks or so in April? So a single magnolia tree can have hundreds of blooms on it at the same time. And these are not

44:07shy blooms. Many of them are the size of dinner plates. The southern magnolias that we have growing all over Atlanta really are the size of porcelain dinner plates in the same kind of bright white color. The magnolia that you have, I suspect, is probably a hybrid between two different Asian species. And I'd imagine in some years, the late frosts might kill the buds or kill the flowers. So an incredible explosion of blooms. And the blooms are actually relatively simple structure. A bowl of petal-like structures, technically they're tepals, with male and female structures

44:42on the inside. And that is what the ancestral flower was like. A relatively simple bowl of advertising petals with a hermaphroditic sexual structure at the center that was welcoming to all kinds of creatures. For magnolias, probably it was mostly beetles. And beetles continue to this day, 100 million years later, to be the most common pollinator of those magnolia flowers. And, you know, the magnolias that we have today have evolved in the last few million years.

45:12But the structure that they have is an echo of the very earliest plants, some of the very earliest flowering plants on the planet. So they're not the oldest, but they come from a branch of the family tree of flowering plants that branched off pretty early and hasn't changed much. Some of the same beetles, like tumbling flower beetles that visit my magnolia tree in my backyard in Atlanta, there are fossilized versions of those from 99 million years ago that have got flowering

45:43plant pollen on them. Other flowers, like the orchids, the grasses, the roses, took that initial relatively simple structure and elaborated it in all kinds of crazy ways to produce the diversity of flowers that we have today. Next, if you are what you eat, then most likely you are part flower. If you were to leave an artichoke

46:14uncut, it would open into this beautiful, almost sunflower-like structure. The case for there being no such thing as a vegetable as we continue our exploration of our floral planet on big picture science. Your work lives in scattered places, and it's not only your team searching for context, your AI agents need it too. Jira taps Atlassian's teamwork graph to bring that context together

46:48across Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and more, and makes it easy to share with the agents you already use, like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. Assign them work directly, or connect your agents through MCP. Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com.

Flowering plants as human food

47:06As we continue speaking with biologist David Haskell about the ways in which flowers have remade our world, we consider one vital way humans rely on them, flowering plants feed us. But while you may prioritize and enjoy your veggies, some biologists and botanists like to say that vegetables don't exist, that's not a scientific thing. We'll find out why not, and as we wind up our conversation with David,

47:42ask him, while flowering plants do a magnificent job supporting us, and much of the great diversity of life on this planet, how well do we return the favor? I brought you something else, and I'm going to give this to you, and then will you describe what's in this bag? Okay. The mystery bag. I'm opening the bag. Oh, look at this. This looks like dinner. So what we have is a broccoli. Uh-huh.

48:12You're trying to, you're scraping it so it makes a sound. Oh, smart. We have a carrot. Yes. We have an artichoke. I wonder if anyone could identify it just by the sound that you made. And we have an apple. I won't bite into the apple just yet. It would make a nice crunching sound. Yes. So we have all sorts of manifestations of flowering plants that are edible to humans. Yes. And am I right in saying that the broccoli and the artichoke, let's start with them, are not just produced by flowering

48:43plants. They are the actual flowers. Yes. So if you grow broccoli in your backyard, and don't cut it at that green cloud-like stage, but let it grow, each one of those little green blobs will mature into a little yellow flower. They're actually really beautiful. But they're even more beautiful sautéed with a little garlic, so they don't make it that way in my garden. So that's the flower in the floret. Yes. It is a flower. Okay. So we're eating immature flowers when we're eating broccoli. And the same with the artichoke. If you were to leave an artichoke uncut, it would open into this

49:19beautiful almost sunflower-like structure. And what we are doing is eating some of the flesh at the base of those. So indeed, these are two edible forms of flower. And the artichoke is a bud? Is that what it is? Is it a... Yes. These are the scales that are protecting the flower that's held on the inside. Well, you know, there is a camp of scientists, biologists, and botanists, and I wonder if you're in this camp that say there's no such thing as a vegetable. Are you one of them? You don't need

49:52to admit. You know what? I'll let you just think about that because I'm going to follow it with another question. Let's put it this way. If a carrot is not a vegetable, what is it? You know, I think a vegetable is a perfectly legitimate cultural term. And in botany, a vegetable doesn't really define anything. It's not a precise scientific term. But when I go to the grocery store and I tell my partner, I'm going to go buy some vegetables, it's very well understood what's happening there. So I do think that dividing terms that we use in our everyday culture from the

50:23more precise language within science, which is precise for a reason, but we only need to be precise in the narrow confines of, say, botanical definitions. So the carrot would be a root, a potato is a tuber, an apple is actually a swollen receptacle around from the base of the flower, around the seeds on the inside. I don't know if I can offer anyone a swollen receptacle pie. Yes. Well, we're mostly eating when we eat, say, rice and wheat and corn, which are three species of

50:57grasses that form at least half of all the calories that we eat around the world. As humans, we're eating ground up embryo and ground up sibling of embryo that was full of all the starch and other things. So it's a horror movie out there. If you start naming the different parts, we're eating little baby plants and we're eating swollen ovaries and so on. So it's just like, get used to being in a world that is fully embodied and where humans are devouring the sexual and reproductive parts

51:29of other beings to feed ourselves. I don't know what deities came up with this way of running the world, but that's how it is. Well, David, flowers support us and much of the great diversity of life

Conservation and human responsibility

51:41on this planet. As we've described, how well do we return the favor? How well are we caring for them and their habitats? For a few, we're caring very, very well for the crop plants. We form this incredible and often very beautiful symbiosis with a small number of plants where we have figured out exactly what the apple trees or corn plants need and made that really work. And there are now more corn plants on this world than there ever have been, partly through that symbiosis. The challenge moving forward in those agricultural systems is how do we do that without having runoff from our fields, without

52:16destroying all the biodiversity of the areas that we cleared in order to grow this corn? So for a small number of plants, they're doing very well, including the weedy plants, which are some of my favorite flowers, the one that grow unexpectedly on the edges of the fields and in the cracks in the pavement. But then for many other plants, we're creating big problems as far as we can tell about 50%. 50% of all orchids, 50% of all magnolias around the world, maybe it's more like 40% for some of those

52:46are at risk of extinction, mostly because we are clearing their habitats. Sometimes with the orchids, we're overexploiting them, bringing too many of them out to the wild because they're valuable in the trade. Climate change, of course, is changing habitats very rapidly. And plants are able to adapt, but only if they have large populations, only if those populations are interconnected with one another. And time. And given some time, and there's time, flowering plants will be around long after

53:18humans have disappeared or have evolved into something else. But what we can do to help plants create a more beautiful, flourishing, sustainable, green world is to honor their agency and their creativity for at least 100 million years longer. Flaring plants have been adapting to all sorts of changes on this planet. And they have the genetic capacity to do that. What we need to do is give them the space and the ability to do that, which is why habitat protection, bringing native species into

53:50city parks and to gardens, educating people about the necessity of working together rather than against local species in our environment is so important, not just to produce beautiful things and thriving ecosystems in the present, but to give the future the diversity of species and of genetics within those species so that plants can adapt to whatever is coming next. Who knows in 1000 years what crazy thing we humans are going to invent, or some

54:22meteorite will come out of nowhere, or there'll be some other change that we can't predict. And yet, given enough time and given enough genetic variability, flowers can adapt to. So yes, we are in some situations being good partners, but in many cases, we're not. We're neglectful. We've fallen out of good relationship with many species. And my hope with this book is to elevate the stories of creativity of flowering plants, of their flexibility, the diversity of the ways that they live around the world, so that perhaps, hopefully, people

54:56will be inspired to pay more attention to those flowers and to be good neighbors and kin to the to the flowers in their local environment. Well, then, then finally, David, you've actually said this through this discussion, but I will ask it directly, how might we experience the world differently or live differently? If we took to heart how central flowers are to our existence? What would we notice? How, how might time change? If we sat and watched or spent some time with a flower or our sense of being interconnected with the natural world instead of separate from it?

55:31I close the book with a series of fun, playful activities to encourage people to connect with our bodies, with kids, with people in our community. Some are simple, some are a little more involved, like making perfume in your own kitchen. And for me, that increases attention. It increases the richness of the life. An apple is no longer an apple. I can see the whole narrative of the flower in the apple. And that produces more joy, a greater sense of belonging. And we all need in this age of alienation and distraction, we all

56:05need that sense of belonging and joy. And on a practical level, that level of attention is what the world needs. Imagine if more people were connected to the flowering plants of their neighborhoods, were more awed and inspired by the botanical diversity around us. I think we would live in a place that is not just better for the plants, but is better for all of us to live in.

Developing flower consciousness

56:28You talk about developing flower consciousness. And one of the things you suggest that we do is quite simply sit with a flower for a while. And I think you mean outdoors, not a cut flower like the ones that I brought you, but perhaps that too. But let's say we do. We sit with the flower outdoors. What do we do next? What are you asking people to do? And then what happens when we do that? Yes, you can sit with the flower in many ways. And in fact, a cut flower indoors works beautifully for this as well. One is to just sit without expectation or questions and just open your senses. What are the

57:02textures? What are the aromas? And when you think you've seen it all, just return your attention. And this is an exercise in mindfulness to all of those details of the flower. And I promise you, you will never again see that kind of flower in the same way again. It will explode in its diversity. It's like forming a friendship with a person, right? At first, you just learn someone's name, but then you get to know all the different layers of their story. The second way of sitting with flowers is with curiosity and questions turned on. What is this flower's name? To whom is this flower

57:37speaking? These insects or maybe no insects involved, it's the human mind that has constructed this horticultural flower. Whose hands brought this flower here? If you're in a park, there were gardeners who took care of that. Or maybe it was you who planted the flower. Or if it was a cut flower in a vase, it may have come thousands of miles. So thinking about all the backstories of presence and travel, even into deep time, what plant family does this flower belong to? And then you start

58:09asking about kinship and seeing patterns beyond that. And then the last thing I do is sit with my imagination open and every flower has an invisible electrical field around it. It has aromas that I can't detect. The flowering plant is talking to fungi below the ground. The eggs and the pollen are interacting with each other at a chemical level within the flower. And this you need a little bit of botanical knowledge. But with just a little bit of that knowledge, you can imagine the unseen world within and around the flower. And it becomes almost a magical being to spend time with. And it's free.

58:46So these practices, you don't need to fly off to some fancy part of the world or buy special equipment. Just find a flower growing in a weedy lot. And the only trick is to give the flower the gift of your attention, your repeated attention, and see where that takes you. David George Haskell is a biologist, and he is the author of How Flowers Made Our World, The Story of Nature's Revolutionaries. David, it's been an absolute delight talking to you. Thank you. Thank you, Molly. Such a pleasure.

59:17Thank you.

59:28This show would not be possible without the bloomin' talents of senior producers Seth Shostak and Gary Niederhoff, producers Shannon Geary, that is Shannon Rose Geary, and Brian Edwards, and contributors Sikhan Akban and Roland Pease. I am the executive producer of Big Picture Science, Molly Bentley. Also, a big thanks to our listeners and our Patreon supporters. The original music in the show is by Dewey DeLay and June Miyake. And this episode of Big Picture Science that makes a strong

1:00:00case for stopping to smell the roses is called Our Floral Planet.

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