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At this time of year there normally would be a burst and a profusion of newly greened textures throughout the landscape of the Sonoran Desert. The monsoon rains from last year, and the early spring rains this year would have done their job. And colors and textures would be more than obvious.
Except that we are in the middle of an extreme drought. So admittedly, there are not so many flowers this time of year as we might expect in the early months of spring. Yet, anthropologist and natural science writer Loren Eiseley was right. It wasn’t the stirrup, the bow and arrow, the steam engine, or the microchip; rather, it was flowers that first transformed the earth and made it ours.
In a remarkable essay, “How Flowers Changed the World” (found as a chapter in an equally perceptive 1957 book, The Immense Journey), Eiseley reminded us, as hard as it may to imagine today, “once upon a time there were no flowers at all.”
In the first ages of our geologic history, long before the dominance of mammals, plants were water-bound. They did not reproduce by seeds but by microscopic swimming sperm that had to wriggle their way through water to fertilize the female cell. Life at that time could not venture very far from large bodies of water. The world in that age was slow in motion. The coldblooded occupants were most active at midday but their brains were dampened and lethargic in the chilled nights of that time.
At some point, just before the close of the Age of Reptiles, there arose the emergence of the flowering plants. As Eiseley wrote, the appearance of these angiosperms also contained “the equally mystifying emergence” of humankind.
Our high metabolic rate and constant body temperature require a heavy intake of energy. In effect, our own appearance depended on the innovation of the angiosperm. How?
The word angiosperm means “encased seed” which is a fully equipped embryonic plant packed in a little enclosed box stuffed full of nutritious food. But, in fact, the food produced by the reproductive system of flowering plants comes in three different forms. Each of these food forms gave rise to remarkable diversity and adaptability.
First, there are the tantalizing nectars and pollens intended to draw insects and birds for pollinizing purposes. Those nectars, for example, are responsible also for “that wonderful jeweled creation, the hummingbird.” Yes, we see them here in the Sonoran Desert.
Next, there are the enticing fruits to attract larger animals. And in those fruits are concealed the tough-coated seeds – as in the tomato, for example. Then, as if this were not enough, there is the food in the actual seed itself. And so it is, the food that is intended to nourish the embryo also provides huge nourishment for us – in the many grains we now find throughout the world, for example.
Yet, it was not just that there was high energy food. Equally important, it was that these remarkable seeds were able to migrate far away from the bodies of water to which the plants were initially bound. Again we might ask, how?
Incredibly, as in the dandelion or milkweed seed, the encased box of food can be wafted and carried upward to ride the wind for miles by means of feathered attachments. With hooks the seeds might also cling to the hide of a bear, a coyote, or a rabbit. Or like some of the berries, they can be covered with attractive fruits that lure the birds so that they can pass undigested through intestinal tracts and be voided miles away.
In effect, these plants, these foods, traveled as they had never traveled before. They got into strange environments heretofore never entered by the old spore plants or the swimming sperm. The well-fed little embryos – skipping, hopping and flying about the woods and the valleys, and yes, even down to the desert floors — planted themselves everywhere. And this gave us the diversity and adaptability that helps sustain a robust environment.
It was the rise of the flowering plants that provided that energy and changed the nature of the living world. One might suggest then, that without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, had we continued to exist at all, we would be unrecognizable today. The Archaeopteryx, the lizard-bird, might still be snapping at beetles on a sequoia limb; and we might still be “the genie in the bottle, encased in the body of a creature about the size of a rat.”
Yes, as Eiseley wrote in 1957, “the weight of a petal has changed the face of the world and made it ours.” And even if we are mostly unaware of the larger world and the changing climate around us, we might today, in our own best interest, ask the question, will the way we use the steam engine and the semiconductor chip somehow overcome the vitality of flowers? It never hurts to at least ask such questions. And here is hoping the answers provide for the well-being of both the flowers and the human spirit.
There is neither a law of physics nor economics that prevents us from quadrupling the productive use of energy and other resources. Rather, it is much more an issue of imagination and our political will to get it done.
– John A. “Skip” Laitner