We’ve all been fascinated with flowers our whole lives. Flowers are beautiful and bring hope, renewal and happiness. Flowers are placed at the centers of all of our most important ceremonies and moments. We tie them in bouquets, assemble them in showy multi-floral arrangements, gift them as a single blossom, or we shower them in a congregational moment onto a solemn casket or grave.
Flowers adorn and are worshiped in our religions. Our greatest painters have been fixated on their forms and colors for centuries, from Monet’s Water Lilies to Georgia O’Keefe’s Red Poppy. There may be more poems and songs about flowers than any other subject except love.
“Earth laughs in flowers,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. And his thought leaves us thinking about what life on Earth would be like without any flowers? Look around. Are there any flowers in your sight right now? If not, go share a laugh with Earth, and find some.
Why write about flowers right now?
Is there anything new happening with flowers these days? Are they making any news? Or, are they mostly just good for a pleasant diversion from all the other events of the day?
We’re glad you asked.
What’s new with flowers these days is all about what’s old. Teams of paleobiologists, botanists and other scientists have been finding new fossil evidence that flowering plant life emerged here many million years earlier than previously believed. New flower fossil records now date back to 140 million years, outdating dinosaur records of just 70 million years ago.
That may not sound very sexy to you, but you can’t really talk about flowers without talking about sex. After all, what do think a flower is? It’s the sex organ of a plant that us humans call our “unmentionables.”
Charles Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution, was especially perplexed by flowers. When he found evidence that 120 million years ago there appeared to be a “great explosion” of new flowering species he at first refused to believe it. The lineage of plant species he uncovered included almost all the living flowering plants that still existed around him. It is said that Darwin took the mystery of flowers to his grave and the subject was among some of his final words and thoughts on his deathbed.
The advent of flowers may be the climax of evolution among all species on Earth. Flowers allowed plant species to spread their dominion far from their rooted habitat by casting fermented seeds to the wind or on the wings of insects and the fur of animals. Fertile flowers also produced seeds and fruits that many animals, especially humans, considered food. Thousands of these seed-producing plants have now been domesticated, furthering the expansion of the flowering plant kingdom.
A single plant or flower can produce thousands, even millions, of progeny. Before flowers, flora such as ferns, ginkgo trees or seedless conifers relied on dropping spores on the ground beneath them to further a next generation. (Not exactly life in the fast lane, don’t you think?)
Flower Sex
While some of the earliest flowering plants had either male or female sex organs, most flowering plant species today have both sexes within each blossom. And, don’t get too aroused, but many flowering plant species actually have more than two sets of sex organs, including two male organs for every female organ. (Anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ social critics would go bonkers if they tried to make sense of floral biology or the study known as anthecology, or pollination.)
Almost all flowers, be they roses or a broccoli, have a female carpel (ovary) and a male stamen that produces pollen (sperm.) Some plants can self-pollinate with a little aid from the wind or natural movement. Most require a pollinator like a bird or bee or another insect.
A fertile carpel enlarges within the sepal at the base of a flower and produces a seed. In most plants a second fertility process also occurs that results in the development of a “food sac” surrounding the seed. (Picture an apple or avocado.)
Beyond all this sexy talk about flowers, there are both exotic and artificial flowers to be considered. Flowers — as both food crops and beautiful commercial blooms — are a major agricultural industry. And, we’ve already hinted about the role they play in religious symbolism and as subjects of art and song.
Flowers are the source of many medicines and not just brewed teas. Without even knowing it, most people’s favorite flower might be hops. At least it is the most consumed, right?
There are at least 250,000 different flowering plant species, with more being discovered all the time. The kingdom of flowers is as diverse as with an orchid to a bearded lily, or to a stalk of broccoli or prairie clover. There are plants that produce microscopic blooms and the largest known flower grows on the Corpse Plant (rafflesia arnoldi) that can measure a full meter in diameter and weigh 24 pounds.
“The fantastic seeds skipping and hopping and flying about the woods and valleys brought with them an amazing adaptability,” wrote the naturalist author Loren Eiseley in his 1957 book, “The Immense Journey.” “If our whole lives had not been spent in the midst of it, it would astound us.” It still does, doesn’t it?
Flower Money
Flowers are not just about romance and religion. They are big business. The commercial cut flower business is a $50 billion annual industry in the U.S. and countries like The Netherlands, Kenya and Mexico are major players in the international floral trades. For as little at $39.99 you can send a bunch of flowers to almost anywhere in the world within one day, but you also can spend a whole lot more, depending on your taste and wallet.
Teleflora, of Los Angeles, is one of the country’s most profitable private companies. And FTD (Florists Transworld Deliveries) dates from 1910 when a small group of florists formed a network via telegraph systems to deliver fresh blooms. Today FTD has 30,000 local florist shop members in 125 countries and owns the website Proflowers.com.
In the fertile agriculture region of Sonoma County where I live, flowers and nursery stock totaled $10 million in production in 2020. That’s a minor percentage of the county’s $1 billion crop dominated by winegrapes, but it is still a lot of jobs.
Fake Flowers
Artificial flowers made of paper, plastic, feathers, glass, silk, soap, clay and metals are also a big business. Fake flowers date back to Egyptian and Roman times when ceremonial flower wreaths were made from ribbon, wax and silk.
Now we see artificial flowers and plants everywhere, from restaurant tabletops to permanently lush plastic hedgerows and tree-like cellular communication towers.
Many of us might still rue our childhoods that were adorned with a silvery aluminum Christmas tree and plastic poinsettias.
Haven’t we all encountered some plastic daffodils or daisies or molded rose blooms and asked, “Why?”
Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
“Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” is a song written by Pete Seeger in 1955. He was inspired by an older folk song and added his own anti-war verses that made the song a big hit when it was recorded by The Kingston Trio in 1961. In Seeger’s song, all the flowers are gone because they were picked by young girls who placed them on the graves of their fallen soldier husbands. Seeger asks, “Oh, when will they ever learn; Oh, when will they ever learn?”
There are too many songs about flowers to pick just a few favorites. Which songs come to mind for you? How about, “Ring Around the Rosie,” the nursery rhyme? Or the C&W classic, “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden?”
Tchaikovsky wrote “The Waltz of Flowers” as part of his “Nutcracker Suite” in 1892. French singer Edith Piaf is known mostly for a single song, “La Vie en Rose” and do you remember the melody for “There is a Rose in Spanish Harlem,” sung by The Drifters in 1961?
Did any of you come up with “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” by Tiny Tim? And where were you during the Summer of Love in 1967 when you first heard the song “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)?
Flower Children
Speaking of the Summer of Love, that is when all the Flower Children blossomed for a very short season. The term Flower Child was used as an alternative name for hippies, loosely associated with an anti-war protest a year earlier when poet Allen Ginsberg and others called on thousands of protesters to surround The Pentagon where some protesters were photographed placing single daffodil blossoms in the gun barrels of uniformed guards.
In January of the same year (1967) thousands of young people gathered in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for a Human Be-In where flowers were a main theme and decoration. Six months later, thousands of other Flower Children attended the Monterey Pop Festival to hear the psychedelic music of The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and others that became the historic soundtrack to the short-lived Summer of Love.
The kingdom of flowers and flowering plants would have done just fine without any interference from us humans. But that’s not how our planet works anymore. You can’t just have the birds and the bees and the blossoms.
Now there is always us.
Did you know there is a Slow Flower Movement that is organized to fight against the global corporate influences over the international flower economy and in support of local growers’ communities? You can check it out at www.slowflowers.com.
Otherwise do your best to help Earth do more laughing with flowers.
— Rollie Atkinson
8-11-2024
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