David George Haskell Interview, plus links to author biography, book summaries, excerpts and reviews

An interview with David George Haskell

A conversation with David George Haskell, author of How Flowers Made Our World

Your past books have taken on a host of biological subjects: you followed a one-meter patch of forest through the seasons, illuminated complex networks in nature through the lives of trees, explored our planet's sonic diversity, and much more. What inspired you to turn to flowers for How Flowers Made Our World?

We live on a floral planet. Flowers changed the course of Earth's history, creating most modern habitats and catalyzing the evolution of humans. I wrote this book to share this extraordinary story, which I regard as the great untold tale of evolution. Even many biologists do not fully realize the revolutionary powers of flowers.

As in my other books, I interweave rich sensory observation with the latest scientific discoveries, aiming to enrich readers' own experiences of flowers and the living world. This book is a culmination of what I've learned as a biologist and writer over the last thirty years: that even though we often dismiss flowers as mere ornaments, flowers run our world, from building ecosystems, to spurring the diversity and vitality of animals, to being the foundations of human agriculture. I touch on these themes in all my previous books, but here I fully explore and celebrate floral creativity and productivity. In the book, I also delight in the sensory exuberance of flowers and the many ways they appear in our culture, from perfume, to funerary offerings, to symbols of love.

I hope that after reading the book, readers will experience flowers with more delight, curiosity, and reverence.

Flowers evolved long after complex animals and most other plants, but they had an explosive impact. What are the secrets to their rapid success?

Flowers evolved shockingly late in the grand arc of Earth history, hundreds of millions of years after other plants and complex animals. But when flowers appeared, the party really got going. The diversity and productivity of life on Earth surged.

Flowers used beauty, cooperation, and radical inner transformation to become revolutionaries. Flowers speak in the languages of scent, color, and texture, evoking experiences of beauty and desire in animals. These cross-species aesthetic conversations draw plants and animals into cooperative unions such as pollination, fruit dispersal, and chemical defense against enemies. Whole dynasties of animals evolved because of flowers, including bees and butterflies but also many birds and mammals, even humans. The oceans changed, too, as seagrass and other flowering plants transformed coastal areas into productive nurseries and larders for sea animals. Floral success creates opportunity for others. Their transformative powers emerge from collaboration. Unparalleled genetic revolutions – especially the rapid multiplication and culling of genes – made possible much of this diversification and innovation.

One of the many flowering plants you explore in the book is the orchid, a plant family that forms fascinating alliances across species. How do orchids exemplify flowers' astounding powers of collaboration?

Orchids are champion relationship builders and often sly tricksters. These intense relationships lead to extraordinary diversity. There are twenty-eight thousand species of orchids (compared to fewer than seven thousand species of mammals), and each one has a unique set of close ties to other species. The shapes and aromas of orchid flowers are often designed to attract only a single, faithful species of insect. Baby orchid plants cannot feed themselves and instead "nurse" from fungi. These specialized relationships cause orchids to become locally adapted, promoting diversity, like a bazaar filled with thousands of unique vendors. A few orchids are also tricksters, such as those whose flowers mimic the smell and appearance of female wasps, duping male wasps into amorous embraces. Other orchids produce elaborate displays of fake pollen or nectar, offering illusions of abundance to their pollinators.

I find orchids fascinating both for their beauty and for the sneaky ways they upend the allegories that we sometimes read into nature. Some orchids exemplify the harmony and generous reciprocity of nature. But others embrace illusion and thievery with gusto. Orchids teach us that nature is not a simple parable, but a rich weave of cooperation and conflict. The tensions within this weave are one of evolution's most potent creative forces.

You explore a wide range of flowers, from well-known to less celebrated blooms. What did you learn from floral diversity?

Paying attention to floral diversity gives us joyful connections to life's creativity, and also helps us to understand how each species adapts to its home.

Part of the genius of flowers is to remake a unifying design – petals whorled around sexual parts -- into hundreds of thousands of variations. One of the joys of writing this book was taking the time to study and delight in the amazing diversity of flowers, then to tell the stories of how this diversity came to be. Outside my kitchen door in Atlanta, for example, are magnolia flowers the size of dinner plates and bittercress flowers so small that I needed a magnifying lens to see them properly. Each flower is adapted to particular pollinators and rhythms of the seasons. Aromas, too, vary greatly, from the delicious layers of scent in a rose to the stink of rotting meat in a corpse flower, a range of sensory expression that allows flowers to work with many animals. Sexuality is likewise variable. Most flowers unite male and female sexual parts in the same bloom, but others are unisexual, change sexes as they mature, or forgo sex altogether. Flowers live in almost every habitat: seagrasses bloom underwater, some violets have underground flowers, and many grasses grow their own fuel to encourage wildfires. Even in the most polluted places on the planet, a few flowers have created homes in the ruins and are restoring life to these otherwise desolate moonscapes. The diversity of flowers not only allows them to thrive worldwide, their success builds abundant possibilities for other species.

You've written that, "Without grasses, we'd still be small-brained apes living in the trees." How did flowers change human evolution?

We humans owe our existence to flowers. Not only did ancient monkey-like primates feed on flowers and fruits, but our more recent pre-human ancestors were entirely dependent on grasses and the animals that eat grass. Our species evolved in the grassy savannas of Africa. This dependence continues to this day, with most human food calories coming from grasses such as wheat, rice, maize, sugarcane, and pasture grass. If we were named for our diet, we'd be called "grass apes". Although grasses have modest-looking flowers, they are among the most successful and consequential of all flowering plants.

Pivot moments in our species' evolution happened when we deepened our relationships with grasses. One such moment happened about 1.5 million years ago when our ancestors in Africa focused their foraging and hunting in fast-growing grasslands. Later, the agricultural revolution was founded almost entirely on grasses.

Our close dependence on grasses is part of a much larger story, one that long pre-dates humans. Grasses have superpowers. They are champion mothers, supplying their little fruits, what we call "grain," with such generous food supplies that grasses have dispersed all over the world and set up new populations. Grasses can also alchemize sunlight and air into food even in drought and extreme heat, and grasses work with fire and grazing mammals to maintain grasslands by encouraging burning or nibbling away trees. Grasses run the show, a form of plant agency. Grasses are great collaborators and community-builders, encouraging the growth of thousands of other species. Want to see spectacular wildflowers? Head to a grassland in spring. In the future, grasses will play increasingly important roles on a hotter, fierier planet.

You explore the many ways that humans use flowers, from perfumes to gardens to scientific study. Why do we find flowers so alluring, and how have we changed flowers?

We're a species fascinated by flowers, especially those that are colorful or aromatic. Tracing the many ways that we use flowers teaches us about our own human nature. We often express our individuality with flowers, from scents to fabrics to garden designs to flowers used in rituals. Flowers were also at the center of scientific revolutions, especially in the early days of biology when the study of flowers lead to the discoveries of genealogy and evolution. Our attraction to flowers reveals how effective flowers are at speaking to animal senses. They captivate and motivate us, as they do other animals like bees, butterflies, and many birds. We, in turn, have boosted the allure of flowers through selective breeding, producing flowers more highly ornamented and scented than any in nature.

The close bond between people and flowers has produced great beauty, but also terrible hidden costs. Flowers bred to please humans often offer no food for pollinators, their original partners. The flower trade also uses prodigious amounts of chemicals, poisons that harm both people and ecosystems. In a tragic twist of history, the study of flowers in biology was distorted into racist dogmas about humans.

Exploring both the beauty and the brokenness of our connections with flowers shows us how to do better in the future. I found inspiring examples of this hope-in-action at the Chelsea Flower Show in London and in recently created public gardens in Brooklyn. There, human and floral creativity combine in ways that support and celebrate both floral and human life.

The impressive resilience and adaptability of flowering plants will likely produce new forms and relationships in the future. Could you share examples of how the flowers of tomorrow will adapt to a changed world?

Playfulness! The flexibility, nimbleness, and exploratory nature of flowering plants allow some of them to swiftly adapt to changing conditions. For example, they remake the shapes and aromas of flowers to attract new pollinators, shift flowering seasons to track a changing climate, and use genetic innovations to detox herbicides and heavy metals. As humans remake the world, these playful plants, often called "superweeds" are taking over. Weediness in this case is a testament to adaptability.

Exuberance! In the much longer term, over tens of millions of years, flowers will adapt to the heat, fire, and poor soils that we humans are leaving behind by ramping up the extravagance of their floral displays and the closeness of their relationships with animals such as nectar-feeding birds. We can see this today in the extraordinary abundance and diversity of flowers in places such as southwestern Australia and the Cape region of South Africa, where flowers have, over millions of years, adapted to natural heat, fire, and degraded soils. Such visions of the future underscore the need to protect the diversity of flowers today, for floral vitality is the precondition for future resilience and renewal.

You write, "The joy we experience from flowers is a modern manifestation of their ancient power to speak to animals in the language of beauty and to build new possibilities." Why is this important, and what are some ways we can connect to that joy today?

At a time when so many of us feel alienated from nature and beaten down by bad news, connection to flowers is renewing and a source of hope. This joyful, renewing power of flowers in our lives is not an anesthetic or distraction. Nor is sensual enjoyment of floral beauty a frivolity. Instead, we reconnect our senses to the vitality and creativity of the living Earth, an antidote to disenchantment. Floral delight is deep, earthy beauty. No wonder flowers features in nearly every cultural ritual: bouquets for young love and funerals, flowers on altars and in carefully tended gardens, perfume and pigment on our skin and in visual art. We're a floral species. We should remember and celebrate this truth.

As well as exploring and celebrating the many wonders of flowers, at the end of the book I offer a series of playful hands-on activities. These invite readers to explore with all their senses, such as pressing flowers in a book, making "moonshine" perfume, enjoying floral treasure hunts, and paying close attention to everyday flowers. These activities are easy to do, fun, and evoke a sense of delight and connection.

What do you hope readers take away from How Flowers Made Our World?

I hope to electrify readers' experiences of flowers. Writing this book transformed how I meet flowers: I feel that I've added a new sense to my body, one powerfully connected to emotions and meaning. Flowers that seemed merely pretty before suddenly burst into new and glorious light. I'd like people to enjoy that wonder, and then to share their floral delight with others.

Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.