How Flowers Made Our World - by David George Haskell (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"A fascinating examination of the enormous impact that flowering plants have had on all life.... Besides bringing beauty and joy into the world, flowers, Haskell asserts, can teach humans an important lesson: 'Thriving worlds grow from cooperation, mediated by beauty, with some illusion thrown in.' An edifying celebration."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"David George Haskell's great strength as a writer is that he is open to surprise. He regards the planet as a strange and beautiful place. How Flowers Made Our World is at once closely observed, richly reported, and mind-blowing."--Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

"'Who runs the world? Girls!' sang Beyonce a while back, but really it's flowers and flowering plants that run this world and have for more than a hundred million years. In this vividly written book, David George Haskell shows how they do that, how flowering plants made the modern world from prairies and rainforests to bees and butterflies, how the most trivialized part of the natural world is among its most powerful and essential."--Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell's Roses

"A tender portrait of flowering plants as powerful agents of change. Flowers wield beauty as a world-making force, actively shaping the planet--and, by extension, us. This book is a joyful exhortation to floral reverence, and brims with curiosity, humor, and crystal-clear scientific delights. We are all more in sway of flowers than we think. Richly precise, How Flowers Made Our World is a celebration of the inventiveness of floral life."--Zoë Schlanger, author of The Light Eaters

"In this dazzling book, scintillating with wonder and scholarship, Haskell shows us how flowers - so often belittled and misunderstood, have shaped ecology, and so shaped us. Flowers are tectonic, and here is a book worthy of them."--Charles Foster, author of Being A Human

About the Author

David George Haskell is a biologist acclaimed for his lyrical explorations of the living world. His books have twice been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, in 2012 for The Forest Unseen and in 2022 for Sounds Wild and Broken. His 2017 book, The Songs of Trees, won the John Burroughs Medal. Other literary honors include a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a two-time finalist for the PEN / E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and winner of the Acoustical Society of America's Science Communication Award, the National Academies' Best Book Award, the Iris Book Award, the Reed Environmental Writing Award, and the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature. He is a fellow of the Linnean Society of London, a Guggenheim fellow, and adjunct professor of environmental sciences at Emory University. He was previously William R. Kenan Jr. Professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Haskell lives in Atlanta, Georgia.