How Flowers Made Our World
The Story of Nature's Revolutionaries
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- Pedido anticipado
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- Se espera: 24 mar 2026
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- USD 13.99
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- Pedido anticipado
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- USD 13.99
Descripción editorial
An exquisite exploration of the power of flowers, placing them at the center of the story of how evolution created the world we know today
We live on a floral planet, yet flowers don’t get the credit they deserve. We admire them for their aesthetics, not their power. In this exquisite exploration of the role flowers played in creating the world we know today, David George Haskell observes, smells, and studies flowers such as magnolias, orchids, and roses, as well as fascinating but less celebrated flowers such as seagrasses and tea to show us what we’ve been missing.
Flowers are beautiful revolutionaries. When they evolved, they remade the natural world: Gorgeous petals and alluring aromas transformed former enemies into cooperative partners. Flowers reinvented plant sexuality and motherhood, bringing male and female together in the same flower and amply provisioning seeds and fruits, innovations that also feed legions of animals, ourselves included. Through radical genetic flexibility, flowers turned past environmental upheavals into opportunities for renewal. This inventiveness allowed them to build and sustain rainforests, savannahs, prairies, and even ocean shores.
Without flowers, human beings would not exist. We are a floral species. Flowers catalyzed our evolution, and we now depend on them for food and a healthy planet. When we perfume ourselves, give a loved one a bouquet, or use blooms in gardens and religious ceremonies, we honor the special bond between people and flowers. The study of flowers also shaped modern science and horticulture in ways both marvelous and, sometimes, unjust.
Looking to the future, flowers offer us lessons on resilience and creativity in the face of rapid environmental change. We need floral creativity, beauty, and joy more than ever. How Flowers Made Our World combines lyrical writing, sensual exploration, and the latest in scientific research to explore some of the most consequential life forms ever to have evolved, showing how our planet came to be and how it thrives today.
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Flowers "belong at the center of the story of how our world came to be," argues biologist Haskell (Sounds Wild and Broken) in this passionate examination. Compared to other lifeforms, flowers were "latecomers," evolving after many complex animals in the fossil record some 150–200 million years ago. The plants quickly diversified and became "champion relationship-builders," as insects, birds, and other animals came to rely on them for food and shelter. Haskell explains how the study of goatsbeard helped scientists discover that some flowering plants duplicate their genomes, a process that allows them to adapt and evolve. The flexibility of plant genetics enabled the development of important crops that supported agrarian civilizations, like wheat, oats, potato, and cotton. Grass, another flowering plant, has also been key to sustaining human populations, building organic and fertile soils and forming a large portion of the calories people consume (rice, maize, and wheat are all grasses). Elsewhere, Haskell demonstrates how flowers elucidate the past—Carl Linnaeus's classification of flowers in the 18th century helped usher in the theory of evolution—and offer lessons for the future, such as "thriving worlds grow from cooperation." Through deep research and lyrical prose, Haskell triumphantly recasts the role of flowers as foundational to humanity. This is astonishing.
