Empire of Flowers — The Power of Flowers Around the World

Why They Are Key to Our Survival and Why We Celebrate Them Today

Once upon a time when dinosaurs still roamed the world, flowers began mysteriously popping their heads through the crust of the earth. If we had been there to watch their debut and spectacular transformation, we would have surely been awed, as the curious creatures of the time undoubtedly were, by how different this form was from anything that preceded it.

It looked different. It smelled different. And as the flower became more spectacularly colorful over time, it was unassailably beautiful, and, at least to the humans who came later, intimated a kind of sublime nature. Earth’s emerging landscape provided one of its greatest gifts to us, a subject of beauty painted upon its own canvas: the flower.

It was a Goldilocks moment for the new plant on the block. The sun’s rays gave it just the right amount of light energy it needed. The earth’s soil and the novel combination of atmospheric chemicals gave it just the right ingredients to keep it going. The flower — engineered with new moving parts like pistils and stamen and pollen — would now reproduce at an astonishing rate, outpacing other simpler less efficient plants like cone-bearing trees and the ferns that had preceded it, marching across the worldly landscape in every direction.

It was the dawn of the “Big Bloom.”

And so began the unprecedented rise of the empire of flowers — as flowering plants took over the world and colonized themselves everywhere, building the largest peaceful empire the world has ever known. Bees showed up in legions just in time to sip their nectar and spread their pollen. The new winged recruits flew from flower to flower drinking nectar, and along the way dropped the pollen — tiny pockets of new genetic material for new plants — down the flower’s pistils. There the pollen united with an egg. There the first infant seeds were born.

To protect its hungry seedlings, the flower now performed a dazzling shape-shifting first act. It dropped its petals and became thick and fleshy in the shape of a fruit to cushion the infant. Conveniently, the baby seed could also eat of the fruit as it grew to maturity. To complete the cycle, animals passing by ate these tempting first fruits and deposited the mature seeds in them on the soil later through their digestive tracts. And so the flowering plants spread.

It was a biological design never before seen and never to be outdone. From it came the benevolent empire of which we are all a part of and upon which the sun has never set.

Today flowers are the gift that keeps on giving. They feed us, cure us with medicinal ingredients, lift our spirits, and do much more — monumental tasks that allow earth’s creatures — including us — to thrive. Masters at their tasks, having hit their stride with large alluring petals around 80 million years ago, flowering plants now make up a whopping 90 percent of earth’s total plants, with 350,000 species.

Until recently I did not realize my own debt to flowers. I saw them as neatly manicured plantings in public parks, long lines of dashing daffodils running down spruced-up highway median strips, sprays of wildflowers, botanical garden specimens, and the brightly colored plants in my own backyard garden. I still keep somewhere tucked in a drawer the botanical illustrations I was forced to draw for my middle school biology teacher Mrs. Hathaway, who demanded exacting precision of us if we wanted a good grade. I remember her passion for the order of nature. I remember memorizing the taxonomical labels she drilled into us for the next test. But I did not grasp the breathtaking interconnectedness of the flowering world just outside our classroom window.

It was only in the past year that I finally saw flowers for what they actually are: the driving force of a flora-centric life support system spanning continents and providing for billions upon billions of subjects.

My awakening came during the solitary walks I took during the pandemic. During this time I hadn’t lost human contact — it just went virtual. On my walks, my senses seemed more acute. I seemed to see and hear and smell differently as city sounds and movement diminished.

Nature assumed new and strange dimensions, exposing a hidden-in-plain-sight side of itself completely unknown to me. I was getting to know it at close range, face-to-face, just like the faces on my Zoom calls. I had the sensation at times while moving through it that a film was playing before me — only in real time. Frame by frame it projected onto the screen of my retina, sharing all of its stories — the exhilarating ones, the quiet ones, the scary and tragic ones. I had never experienced nature this way — as a gigantic interconnected mass with prodigious dynamism.

I found myself asking for the first time: where did all these life forms come from? How did these mighty oaks and maples, cherry and pear trees, sage brush and lavender bushes, the garden vegetables, the thorny strawberry and blackberry patches get here?

The answer: flowers.

For the first time I realized this mind-boggling fact: flowers are the key to our survival. Put another way, without the flowering world all around me, I simply would not be here. I had inhabited a flower-filled commonwealth my whole life without realizing it.

Flowers technically refer to all flowering plants — whether the flowers in our garden beds, the flowering fruit and nut trees in our orchards, the flowering fields of vegetables on our farms, or wild flowering species spread across hill and dale. Whenever we eat an apple or an orange, we are eating the fruits born of the flowers of these plants. Whenever we eat tomatoes, cucumbers, avocadoes, pumpkin, peas, string beans, we are eating the fruits of the flowers born of these plants. Whenever we eat rice, wheat, oats or corn, these foods also originate with a flower, as grains are technically the dry fruits of grasses.

But the empire of the flower does more than sustain us physically. It has given us nature’s most sublime form to fortify us in good times and bad — to carry messages of love to us, to broker peace, to inspire art, to honor the dead, and simply to give us joy.

I became acutely aware of this recently when I received the shocking news that one of my closest friends had died. She was 56. My grief lifted over time only through the uncanny power of the flower to heal.
I had received a text message with the news. My friend had been in the hospital for weeks following surgery to remove a tumor from her brain. Health complications had mounted. When I received the message, I was numbed. My emotions spiraled downward. I had to breathe. I opened the front door and headed out for a walk. My arms and legs were heavy. My body moved mechanically through space. My mind went blank. I lowered the gaze of my eyes to the ground. The autumn day was grey. Its flowers were sparse.

But as I walked I suddenly caught an image in the corner of my eye of a blood-red bouquet of wildflowers tenaciously holding its own in a vast patch of weeds. My mind calmed. My eyes widened. The blood-red color of the flower’s petals matched perfectly the blood-red hue of my friend’s lipstick I had seen her wear over so many years and so many conversations. The petals’ red tint, tinged with dark rich undertones, was mysterious and deep, like this moment, like my friend.

I knelt to pick the natural bouquet. The unexpected arrival of wildflowers provided just the right moment and messaging I needed to reconnect with my friend. My mind re-engaged. I carried the bouquet home. I placed its blossoms around the frame of a small sandalwood box I had set in the kitchen window, a gift my friend had given me after a trip to India years before. The blossoms seemed to naturally ornament the picture there.

On the front of the box, an image of a woman had been painted, draped elegantly in mauve-colored cloth with golden borders, in a style of art from the 16th century. The woman bent her head forward to look down at a tiny bird perched on her hand. The two seemed to be in the middle of a conversation and sharing a moment of repose. It reminded me of my own friend’s love of the natural world and its inner world of flowers. After this walk, I continued to gather flowers and bring them here to offer them up to my friend.

And as I did, my grief lifted and transformed into acceptance. My acceptance transformed into reconnection. Lost love was love regained and sustained — through the power of the flower.

We know from ceremonies around the world that flowers have played pivotal roles in the spiritual and psychological realms of almost all human societies. We have filled our altars, shrines, and temples with them. Our vast collections of art and literature have literally blossomed because of them.

We can be sure that our love affair with flowers — called phytophilia (“phylo” for plant, “philia” for love) — began some time soon after we arrived here two hundred thousand years ago. We were probably giving the gift of flowers to each other long before the first traces in the human record show up.

Those earliest traces to date appear around 15,000 years ago in a cave near Mount Carmel in present-day Israel, thanks to the work of archeologists, There a small grieving community came together to discuss and carry out the novel idea of honoring their dead by making lush beds of flowers for their burial. The ancient Egyptians later wove flower garlands for their departed. The Greeks placed crowns of flowers on the heads of their loved ones at their passing.

In later times the human-flower connection got expressed in other ways. The Persians planted eye-catching cascading flowers in their fabled gardens, and wove their images in their legendary polychromatic carpets. European scribes added flowers copiously to their medieval manuscripts. And the Chinese and Japanese arranged flowers so elaborately that it became a discipline onto itself with its own rules.

Today our love affair with the flower continues.
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We place them outside our doors every May Day. We send 250 million flowers for Mother’s Day. Indians begin their prayers with a presentation of flowers. Mexicans celebrate the Day of the Dead with flowers. Russians visit flower kiosks and shops so often that flower businesses stay open 24/7. Countless crowds are still thrilled to travel hundreds of miles to see floral extravaganzas at the world’s flower shows. The commercial sector in flower production and sales — called “floristry” — garners about $34 billion annually. It is a sector expected to grow.

Writers continue to write odes to the flower. The English poet William Wordsworth conveyed his awe upon discovering a “host of golden daffodils” hugging the side of a lake as he walked one day. Writing from India, the Nobel Prize- winning poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote transcendent prose poetry about flowers, reflecting, “Let life be beautiful like summer flowers, and death by like the autumn leaves.”

Modern artists still make flowers the centerpieces of their canvases. Vincent van Gogh painted his famous post-impressionist still life “Sunflowers” near his home in southern France. He hoped to convey gratitude in it and to sell it for $125. At an auction in 1987, it sold for $40 million, a price that astonished both the auctioneers and our flower-loving world.

And while scientists explore the flower’s physical nature, they too fall under the spell of their transcendent beauty. Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Richard Feynman reflected, “I can appreciate the aesthetic beauty of the flower… [while] the complicated actions of the cells also have beauty. The scientific knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of the flower.”

It has been seven months since I received news of my friend’s death. I still collect flowers for her. I place their blossoms around the edge of the sandalwood box she gave to me, framing the painted image of the woman there keeping company with the bird perched on her hand. Her presence quiets me. The flowers I bring there provide just the opportunity to spend time in the company of my friend, to share one of the things she loved most — the world of nature and its inner world of flowers.

Every day we step outside our front door we are all witnesses to the greatest peaceful empire the world has ever known. We all partake of what some have called the happiest empire in human history that began so many millions of years ago. And all of us receive its infinite gifts for sustenance, and the gratuitous gift of its beauty, which brings us immeasurable joy. In our age of environmental challenges and crises, we are duty bound to sustain the flower as it has sustained us all through time.

As countless poets and painters, philosophers and scientists, have told us, we may never plumb the depths of the mystery of the flower.

When we behold the miracle of a flower, we behold the miracle of ourselves and our astonishing world.

Medium
7 March 2021