Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.
I'm Anne Strain-Champs.
And I'm Steve Paulson.
Every year, at about this time, something truly miraculous happens.
The spring equinox arrives.
The sun crosses into the northern hemisphere.
Daylight outlasts darkness.
And the planet flowers.
Superblooms carpet the California desert.
Magnolias perfume the south.
And here in the north, snow drops and the first tips of daffodils poke through the soil.
These flowers and all the rest that will follow are ephemeral. They look so fragile,
but they're among the most powerful forces on earth.
With a story and an evolutionary strategy that we need now more than ever.
One of the practices is just to sit with a flower. It could be five minutes, it could be an hour,
you can repeat this over and over again with the same flower and watch it through its entire life
cycle and open our imagination to all the things that are happening with that
flower. What is the intention of this flower? Where did this flower first
evolve? And then the flower itself is releasing aromas. It has an electrical
field that has a particular shape around it that is attracting certain insects
and repelling other ones. So sitting with a flower we can pay attention to the
things that we can sense and delight in that, but we can also let our imaginations roam into the
unseed and wonders of the bloom. This is the biologist and celebrated nature writer David
Haskell, and he's just written a remarkable book called How Flowers Made Our World. It really kind
of turns the story of evolution on its head by putting flowers at the forefront of life on earth.
what Roger Payne did for whales and Carl Sagan did for the cosmos, David Haskell is doing for
flowers. And you kept reading bits of that book for me, and you told me that I would never look
at a flower again the same way after listening to this conversation. Was I right? I think you
were right, yeah. So before we dive in, who is David Haskell? He is a biologist, and he's famous
for the way he brings contemplative practice into natural observation. His first book was
The Forest Unseen, and it's the one where he watched one square meter of old-growth Tennessee
forest for a year and turned it into a window into the whole hidden world of forest ecology.
And it was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist. I remember that the great biologist E.O. Wilson
called it a new genre of nature writing located between science and poetry.
Yeah, David Haskell is a gorgeous lyrical writer, I think partly because he's really
sensitive to sound, to the musicality of language. He's written about sonic landscapes, about the
evolution of natural sound on earth, you know, bird songs, animal calls, ocean waves. And he has
this amazing gift for bringing people back into an embodied sensory experience of nature.
Which we witnessed in person, because I remember this gathering.
I wondered if you'd remember that.
That we were at a few years ago in northern Illinois, and he took everyone on a barefoot walk through this prairie oak savanna, and he had us listening and touching and smelling trees, which turned into this, as I remember, this beautiful guided meditation.
Wasn't it like an evolutionary history, kind of going right up to the soil that we were standing on?
It was.
It was also freezing.
You were really cold.
It was October.
It was sunset.
I was shivering.
You very gallantly shared your coat with me.
So I might have missed a little of the profundity.
So I guess it's a good thing that you had this conversation indoors.
We did.
Yeah, let's listen.
So part of the fun of reading this book is this very bold, kind of sexy claim, I think, that flowers made the world.
You know, that they show up in the Cretaceous era, seize the reins of evolution, remake the biosphere, and have been kind of running things ever since.
which is exactly the opposite of the way we usually see flowers as kind of decorative and not much more.
Yes, in our culture, we dismiss flowers as pretty.
We honor them.
We spend a lot of money on flower gardening and cut flowers and so forth.
But we think of flowers as, well, they're just ornaments, really.
And there's a gendered aspect to this because flowers are also in our culture now pegged as pretty much exclusively feminine.
Therefore, the patriarchal logic goes weak and not in charge and ornamental.
And also sexualized, right?
Right.
Which is absurd at many levels.
I mean, at one level, we've picked the most biologically bisexual thing there is in nature, which is a flower.
Most flowers have both male and female sex cells within them.
But also sort of beyond the aspects of gender, we forget that we live on a floral planet.
Almost every bite of food that we humans consume has one way or another been either produced directly by flowering plants or by creatures that have eaten those flowering plants.
We're a flower-eating species.
Our human evolution was catalyzed by flowering plants.
Primates came up into the trees and started eating fruits and flowers.
So without flowering plants, there would have been no primates.
And then our arboreal cousins came out onto the African savannah and became our ancestors
by walking in the grasslands.
And what a grass is, they're a specialized kind of flowering plant.
And then at a global level, ignoring humans for a moment, think about the most productive
ecosystems on the planet today, mangroves, seagrass, meadows, rainforests.
None of these places existed before the evolution of flowering plants.
And rainforests in particular did not exist before flowering plants because one of the innovations of flowering plants was to refashion their water-conducting elements within their bodies so they could chuck enormous amounts of water vapor into the air and photosynthesize at incredible rates.
And when that happened, they changed the weather.
They literally, and this is from the title of a scientific paper, they put the rain in the rainforest.
Oh, my God.
And so, indeed, we live on the floral planet.
If you were to take away the flowers from the grand narrative of Earth evolution, we'd still be on a marvelous planet, right?
There'd be amazing ferns, all kinds of cool mosses and cycads and pines.
But take away flowering plants, and we take away much of Earth's diversity, and we certainly take away humans, which is not how we normally think of human evolution, right?
We don't think of, oh, well, we thank the flowers for our creation, but that's what we should be doing.
Yeah, so here's the thing. When I sat down with your book and started reading, I had a really visceral reaction because of that historical association of women with flowers. If flowers are such prime movers, so essential for needs as basic as food, why don't we see them this way? Like, how and why did flowers, like women, get dismissed and denigrated?
I mean, the two, of course, are tied up together and it's taken different forms in different cultures.
I mean, for British and French kings, flowers were symbols of divine right to rule, right?
With roses and irises and so on used as symbols of power.
Sure.
The Tudor roses and the French lilies.
And in the Middle East, the rose perfume was regarded for centuries, if not for millennia, as actually quite a masculine scent.
And so it hasn't always been the case that we've lived embedded in the present cultural prejudice around flowers.
But there are ancient roots to our general dismissal of flowers and more broadly of plants.
If you look at Paleolithic cave paintings in Europe, there are almost no plants and no flowers represented whatsoever.
It's 99% animals.
The things that first catch our attention are the other creatures that are communicating the way we do.
There's a reason why birds are present in almost all scriptures and creation stories,
is that they sing and speak and they have flashy colors and they're at the same spatial scale as we are.
So we relate to the birds.
We relate to fast-moving animals.
And in the plant world, we often relate mostly to the trees and the things that really catch
our attention.
So there is a sort of sensory bias that is at play.
But also there's a story, I think, and a prejudice about power.
Is that we, and this is one thing that I think is really important for our present time,
an important message from the Flowers, is that we often think of power and revolution as about
control, authoritarianism, and violence. Might makes right.
But that's not the only way in which revolution and power and transformation take place. Flowers
offer a different narrative. They changed the world in revolutionary ways through cooperation,
through collaboration, often mediated by beauty, by sensory experiences. So a flower
is quite literally speaking to the sensory system of a bee or of a hoverfly or of a bird
to draw that animal in to establish a cooperative relationship, a reciprocal relationship.
And we're just the latest animal to become enchanted by the flowers and to become loyal collaborators with the flowers.
And we see this in our gardens and horticulture and agriculture.
The thing that you're pointing out that feels so amazing to me is it's not just that flowers give us a story of evolution.
It's a story of relationship and cooperative networks.
It's a story in which beauty and delight, joy, enchantment are not frivolous.
They're not even optional.
They are essential to the entire biosphere, essential to the way nature works.
I can feel my heart open thinking about that.
You know, and that's one thing that happened to me as I was writing this book.
As I went through these chapters and, of course, gathering information and experiences and thinking about this,
realizing how, again and again, the catalytic effect of flaring plants is mediated by beauty.
And that's something that our culture right now, we need more of that. We need more beauty and joy.
And I think, I mean, think about human ethics. Often we think about ethics, like,
should I, what sort of action is right action or wrong action? We think of that as an intellectual
exercise, like, let's figure this out in the seminar room. And often the experiences of beauty
have no place in that conversation. Flowers, and I would argue other creatures as well,
teach us a different story that by opening to the importance and the fundamental significance
of beauty, we actually get a guide to where might we root ourselves to find the path to right action.
So, for example, someone who's lived in a particular neighborhood for decades and really
paid attention to it, both the human community and the more than human community. When something
happens in that neighborhood, that person will have a deep sense of this change is really
beautiful or it's profoundly broken and ugly in some way. And often the beautification things,
the superficial beautification is actually creating ugliness elsewhere. For example,
spraying things with pesticides to get rid of so-called weeds. Well, it produces a uniform
green lawn, which is beautiful in a certain way, but it's not deeply beautiful. So deep experiences
of beauty that are built over time and really see the whole network of relationships, I think,
are the place to ground morality. There's a few things more motivating than a profound sense of
beauty. And that leads to the other word, which is joy, is this unasked for, unearned
sense of connection and of elevation of life that far transcends the self.
I want to ground us a little bit more
And you wrote this gorgeous chapter about magnolias
Which grow all over your area, Atlanta
And here in the upper Midwest, we have tulip trees
Are those the same thing?
They are related to one another
They're close cousins
So in my neighborhood, I have a neighbor who has a huge, mature tulip tree
It's taller than her house
And every spring, when it bursts into bloom
she sends a party invitation to the whole neighborhood, and people gather underneath
that tree. This is usually the first outdoor time people have come together after a long winter.
People bring food, the kids show up, people talk about what they did last winter,
they notice how the kids have grown. It's become a neighborhood seasonal rite. And I love thinking
that the tree itself in bloom is the party.
So anyway, I knew you'd love it, but tell me about your magnolias.
Well, first, I absolutely adore that story because I think one thing we need more than
almost anything else in our culture is renewal of rituals of celebration around other species.
So the first blooming of the tulip trees or the return of the chimney swifts.
The first spring peepers in the spring, and I have practices of this for myself, and I've invited students and neighbors and friends into these.
And for me, they are extraordinarily important.
What's one of yours?
Well, lying down on my cracked driveway here in Atlanta with my hand lens and looking close at the bittercress weeds that are growing up through the cracks in the driveway
that have these absolutely gorgeous ivory cream flowers.
They're tiny little flowers.
And they come up when everything else is still quite muted.
And it feels like this eruption of possibility and of hope from the ground
in the most improbable place, which is busted up concrete in a driveway
in an urban area in the middle of a big city.
And yet for me, those are often the most beautiful experiences.
The vitality of life in unexpected places.
because that's what's coming.
In a few million years, humans will have gone extinct
or will have evolved into something else.
Bittercress will have taken over the continent.
Magnolia trees will be coming out of the edges of the cities.
So, yes, gathering communally to celebrate creatures
like the tulip trees is really, really important.
The significance of the tulip tree and the magnolia
is that these are descendants almost unchanged of some of the very first flowering plants
to appear on the planet. If you look at the structure of a tulip tree flower or of a magnolia
flower, it's essentially a relatively simple bowl of petals with both male and female parts inside
that bowl of petals. And the magnolias in particular produce this absolutely gorgeous
aroma that drifts like ribbons of scent through the city. Even the more diesel-fume-choked parts
of the city, you get little, here in Atlanta, you get little whiffs of magnolia blooms in May.
And they're almost tropical, right? Because think of those big, waxy, cup-shaped flowers with this
intoxicating scent inside. And the flowers are the size of dinner plates. So this is not a subtle
form of beauty, which is part of the point of flowers. They want to do what it takes
to draw in creatures. And the creatures that are most attracted to magnolia flowers,
it's the creatures that were the first pollinators of the first flowers, tiny little beetles and
flies. And particularly the beetles seem absolutely intoxicated by this scent.
How do the flowers make their scent? What part of them? I don't even know how to describe the
smell of the magnolia i just know it feels heavy and rich yes and it's transporting for me i know
it sort of knocks me sideways when i and and there's a little narrative arc within the aroma
right it's sort of a little bit bitter and cucumbery when the magnolia flower first opens
with layers of clove and a little bit of citrusy stuff coming and then when it's fully open
the bitterness goes away and you're just in this colored warm world that feels like soaking in a
nice bubbly bath with this whole body sensation that lasts for a few seconds and then it's gone
and you're back to being a normal old human standing on the sidewalk. So it's kind of like
being high. Well, I mean, it is being high. What is being high? It's, you know, when you smoke a
joint, you're taking botanical chemicals into your body and they're uniting temporarily with
nerve receptors. When you smell a flower, those aromatic molecules are going directly
into your nose, but also into your bloodstream and binding with the cells of the human body
and producing a particular neurological effect. It might be very temporary, a little
a burst of pleasure, and medicinalists and herbalists have known this for a long time,
the aromas of flowers and also the aromas of tree resins and other things can be very healing,
not as a placebo effect, but because those molecules go into our body and actually heal us.
The aromas of basswood trees and linden trees, for example, have been shown to be very calming
to human anxiety. You can get that through smelling and also through drinking a tea
made from the flowers of the linden tree. Wow, I just feel like we need to pause for a second
because when I smell, I don't know, especially potent rose or, I don't know, some of the peonies
I love best have this peppery, sweet smell, it never occurs to me that that smell is going
inside me, that its molecules are moving into my brain affecting me neurologically.
Smell is the most impudent of the senses.
It doesn't have the decency to act at a distance the way sound and light do.
Quite literally, part of the flower's body enters our body and merges with us.
We become chimeric.
And you'd asked about where they come from in the flower.
It depends a little bit on the flower.
But for many, the petal itself is a living aroma diffuser.
The cells on the top surface of the petal are producing aromatic oils and letting them go into the air across the cell membrane.
If you look at, for example, a rose petal under a microscope, it's completely carpeted with conical cells that are stuffed full of aroma.
And of course, when the sun hits that, it's a warmed aroma diffuser, right?
And those oils then bind inside our nerve receptors, or if we're using them as a perfume
or rubbing ourselves in rose petals, they actually get onto the skin.
And on the skin, they have antibacterial properties.
These aromas are not just produced to attract insects or other animals.
They also protect the petals, at least some of them do.
They have antimicrobial, antifungal functions.
So we get that, too, when you put that aroma on your skin, it actually kills some of the bacteria there.
Let's pause there and just savor that image of rubbing rose petals all over your skin, soaking in all that beauty and healing.
I'm talking with David Haskell about his new book, How Flowers Made Our World.
And we'll be right back.
You
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this is wonder cabinet i'm an strange champs and i left you swimming in rose petals so let's see
where david takes us next so you went to a place i've always wanted to go in provence to grass
where they've been making perfume for centuries and you went to the famous international perfume
museum garden which i i just imagine that is a totally intoxicating experience
It is.
It's extraordinary.
Grasse these days is still a hub for perfume manufacturing and marketing and was a place
where, because of the microclimate there, they could grow aromatic flowers and other
plants from all over the world.
And there are museums there.
The one that was most fascinating to me is the living museum, the gardens, where various
aromatic plants are grown alongside plants that are native to the region there. So it's a very
ecologically rich place full of bees and birds and just sort of feels like an aromatic garden
of Eden. You said that walking among the roses in the cross garden, you sniffed 400 different
volatiles. I had no idea that flowers could produce that many different aroma molecules.
Yeah, they put the human alphabet to shame, right? So this is the language. I mean,
the analogy is, I sort of mean it intentionally, is that this is the language of plants. Each one
of those 400 different molecules that unite into what we label as the aroma of a rose,
Those 400 molecules all have particular functions within the cell, and they have communicative functions to different species of insects.
And some flowers are very specific.
So some orchids, for example, make a blend of perfume that only one species of wasp in the entire world will be attracted to because essentially that perfume is mimicking the sexual perfumes that the wasps use in their own mating displays.
So that orchid is literally speaking to just one species of insect,
whereas others like the magnolias and to a certain extent the roses,
they have very wide open, welcoming flowers
that are attracting a whole range of different insects.
Part of it, though, honestly, is still mysterious.
We don't know, like, why can't they just get away with 200 molecules instead of 400?
And that kind of question is still one that, as far as I know,
there isn't an answer to, in the same way that if you ask, why does this bird have a song that goes
up at the end and the other bird has a song that goes down at the end with a little trill?
Most of the particularity of the forms of bird song is a complete mystery. There are no good
answers to why they sound. And don't you think something doesn't feel quite right about trying
to reduce it all to utility? Maybe flowers evolved all those different scents and birds
learn to sing all those different songs, partly because it's beautiful.
I mean, everything doesn't have to have a use value.
No, I agree with that.
But I also think that the beauty can be its own use value.
So, for example, a complex bird song,
the very complexity of the song is, to other birds, attractive.
Just like we are attracted to people who are really cool,
you know, the cool DJ or jazz musician
who can do pretty much anything on their piano or with their turntable,
that's kind of cool and sexy.
And so beauty itself is part of the signal.
And complexity and nuance is part of that signal.
So I think the line between beauty and utility in biology gets blurred.
And I don't think the fact that something is utilitarian diminishes its beauty,
its complexity, or indeed its scientific mystery.
Well, we've also, going back to your experience in Cross, you wrote about one little section
of the garden is the garden of forgotten perfume plants, which made me think, are there aromas
that we have forgotten about or aromas that we don't value or appreciate anymore?
Yeah, that's an interesting question.
The ones in the garden, because they've been planted there, someone has remembered them.
More generally, though, we have, for example, in the horticulture trade, mostly forgotten that one of the delights of flowers is their aromas.
So most roses that you would go to the grocery store or the florist store to buy have had the scent bred out of them.
The same is true for many violets that were actually bred and cultivated and brought into people's homes specifically for their scent.
And so we have, as we have for so many other aspects of our lives, turned what was a multidimensional sensory experience into something that is just feeding the eyes.
that this bouquet looks good, but there's no more aroma there,
which to me is a great loss of sensory experience, of richness, of potential joy.
I mean, I was asking that because one of the recurrent thoughts I had in reading your book,
which is, you know, as we said, scents are really difficult to describe in words,
but you do a really wonderful job.
And I was thinking that we really need a richer language for scent or just need to pay more attention to it.
And I was thinking about your earlier work on sound and soundscapes.
And, you know, as an audio producer, that concept of the soundscape speaks really powerfully to me.
And I began to wonder what would change if we started thinking about landscapes as scentscapes.
You know, do certain plant aromas go together?
And then what might that reveal about certain landscapes?
Yes, think like a bee.
Because bees do have a geography, if you like, a map of scent.
And indeed, I mean, I do think that is part of my way of experiencing the world,
is to listen to the shapes of sounds, the different kinds of aromas that we find.
And for example, in the neighborhood where I live now, part of the neighborhood was built
in the 1940s and another part was built basically by a raising forest in the 1990s.
And you can smell the difference as you walk from one neighborhood to the other because
there are old oak trees in one neighborhood and just small little mostly ornamental trees
that have a completely different aroma in the other neighborhood.
Most of us have these experiences, we just don't bring them into consciousness that much.
Well, I was wondering if we paid more attention to aroma, if that actually could lead in any way to better or different science or new ecological strategies.
The one book of yours that I haven't read is 13 Ways to Smell a Tree.
But I think, I'm guessing, that in that book you probably connect smelling trees to ways of fighting deforestation or coming up with better ecological interventions.
Yeah, or re-embodying ourselves and integrating the human intellect with the human senses, I think, is a big task before us.
Not so much, I mean, it's, yes, re-embodying ourselves and remembering, coming back to our senses is important for science, but it's important much more broadly is that that's a foundation for figuring out right action, for finding joy.
And as we were talking about earlier, beauty in our lives, making ourselves whole again.
We have these senses that come, to use a technological analogy, these apps are pre-installed in our body, right?
We don't need to download them, and they're not harvesting our data.
Why don't we turn them on just by turning our attention to the senses, which is a scent
gives us, you know, we actually really enjoy and are present for our cup of tea, and if
we share the experience, as your neighbor does, with other people, we draw people together
into community.
And that's one of the great powers of flowering plants, is they create opportunity and connection
and community for others.
Yeah.
You know, we're kind of living with this drumbeat of advice today
about the importance of relationships for mental
and even physical health and longevity.
You know, over and over I keep reading articles
about the importance of human relationships.
Make sure you have a good network.
Right.
It's always about human relationships.
What about our more-than-human relationships?
Yeah.
What about having relationships with the trees around us or a particular backyard or, as you described, the, you know, crest coming up in the middle of a sidewalk?
Those relationships matter, too.
And I think what all of these things really are about, it's about getting back into our bodies, that embodied intelligence and wisdom, which knows things that, you know, we can't know just using words.
But anyway.
No, I absolutely agree. And I do think, I mean, flowers were revolutionaries not because they focused on themselves, but because they formed these interspecies communicative networks, right? So the flowers are speaking to the insects, they're speaking to the birds and the fungi below the ground.
And I agree that we can expand the bounds of what friendship and kinship mean by befriending the birds, by befriending the flowers, by cultivating flowers in our own lives.
I mean, personally, those relationships have been really important, essential for my own health.
And when I read the advice that you've got to have a big friend network, I think, oh, my goodness, you know, I am failing at that one, right?
So, you know, I mean, I have a number of good friends, but could use more.
And then I think, well, hang on a minute.
There are dozens of birds outside my backyard that I have a pretty deep relationship with.
And I watch them raise their young.
And these flowers that I'm cultivating in my backyard and the vegetables in the community garden,
these are beings with whom I have actually a very deep and intimate bodily relationship with
that when I look at the textures of my own mental health,
the more I get that, the better I feel or the less bad I feel.
Yeah, I'll tell you when I began thinking that is we spend summers in Vermont.
We started doing that recently.
My husband has, Steve has, his parents built a house years and years ago,
just a little summer house in Vermont.
They're older and we've been going.
And when we came back to Madison this fall, after about a week,
there was a day where I thought, I miss something. I can't tell what it is. And I realized I miss
the trees. In Vermont, I miss specific trees. And I kind of felt like, I think it misses me too.
And at first I thought, oh, Ann, don't be so fanciful. And then I thought, no,
that's what a relationship is. Why wouldn't they miss me if I miss them?
And that opened the door to, I don't know, thinking of this as a real relationship, not just me appreciating them from the outside.
I love the way you describe that.
And for me, the thought that comes is the opening of the imagination to what friendship, relationship, and missing someone or being bonded to another being could be.
Because, of course, the trees, whatever form of sentience or intelligence and memory they have, it's going to be of a very different texture than our own because their bodies are, of course, arranged in a completely different way.
So they're not little humanoids, and yet they're living complex beings that are in deep relationship in a very decentralized way with all the creatures around them.
And we do become known by the places.
I mean, at a microbiological level, any place that we've been, we've left our microbiological signature.
We've probably also left some microplastics from our waterproof jacket and so on.
And we've also left those networks of relationship.
I learned this.
The first book I wrote was about sitting watching one square meter of forest for a year.
And at first I thought, well, I'm just an observer here.
But then I came to realize, no, these chipmunks, these birds have come to know that here's this weird guy in a brown jacket who comes and sits on a particular rock every day.
And they basically just ignored me.
I mean, they had their eye on me in a way that I could slip into the forest network without causing alarm after repeated rounds of visiting.
So I became part of that community.
I'm sure if I'd grabbed a chipmunk and murdered it, then there would have been a lot more alarm for several months afterwards.
And in fact, people have done scientific experiments to show that birds and mammals do indeed remember particular individual humans and response to them based on our past behaviors, good or bad.
And so at a level of animal awareness, non-human animal awareness, we become known by landscape.
And I think that's probably true for other beings in ways that are honestly, to me, very mysterious.
I have no idea how a tree experiences the world, and I'm happy not to know because I don't think that's a knowable thing for a human being, but we can cast our imagination into that space.
I think it changes everything, because caring, I think, is a two-way thing, you know, that keeps building. I don't just care for something that can't perceive me, or, you know, it's a kind of chilly, objectified caring.
but the kind of caring that feels alive is when you love your child and you know your child loves
you back that's when we enter into something that feels dynamic and warm a reciprocity of regard and
and it's not just about particular individual places it's just in general this earth is taking
care of us right it's providing the food the oxygen at a very material physical level and
And for me, the challenge is also that there is great brokenness, right?
So the parents who don't love their children, there are children who absolutely love their
parents, and that's part of those relationships as well.
There are parasitic organisms that get into my body and will literally try to kill me
because that's their best strategy for getting on to the new place.
So we live in ecological relationships that are at the same time extraordinarily supportive, completely life-giving, filled with beauty, and at the same time utterly weighted in other regards with pain, with brokenness, with exploitation.
And those two things are simultaneously true.
This land was stolen.
This land is also caring from me.
There are fractures. There's blood soaked into the land. There's triumph from beauty and love everywhere. How do we have practices that can hold both at the same time without getting crushed by the brokenness of things or completely intoxicated by the beauty so that we don't see the fractures and don't see the pain that other people are suffering?
And that's the bit, you know, I don't have an answer to that other than showing up.
And for me, it's through contemplative practice, just being, trying to be awake to the sights and the smells and the stories, the beauty and the brokenness of any particular place, of any particular relationship.
That's so well said and so well taken because we really haven't talked about the ugly side of humanity's relationship with flowering plants.
But, of course, you know, the drive to profit from them led to colonialization and slavery and plantations and then later industrial farming and the development of agrochemical poisons.
And it matters to also hold that brokenness, as you said.
Yes, and particularly around flowers, I think there are things that we can do.
So one of the things that really shocked me in researching this book was the extent to which many flowers that we might find for sale at the garden center are absolutely soaked with poisons that are really horrible for human health, but also for the help of pollinators.
The very creatures that made the flowers in the first place, we're poisoning them.
Even the plants that are labeled wildlife-friendly, because there's no good standard for labeling
of any of these things.
I mean, we're talking about dozens of poisons in one particular plant that we might buy.
The same thing with some cut flowers at the florist shop are just laden with poisons
that mostly are affecting the people who have to grow those flowers.
But as individuals, we have some agency there.
We can decide what we're going to grow in our garden, what kind of things we're going to buy, what things we're going to advocate for in the policy arena, so that flowers can once again become unambiguously good.
By changing our aesthetics and priorities, we could actually change our relationship to flowering plants, which I think would be an extraordinary gift to give ourselves and also the future.
That's the celebrated biologist and writer David George Haskell
Author of Sounds Wild and Broken
The Songs of Trees
And I highly recommend his brand new book
How Flowers Made Our World
It is an exhilarating read
And perfect for springtime, too
And hopefully you can find some flowering plants to appreciate this week
And maybe follow David's example of just sitting with one for a while
Actually, Steve, I was thinking about that
and it reminded me of another exercise.
Do you remember when we were at the Island of Knowledge
in Italy probably a year ago
and there was another contemplative biologist there,
Andreas Faber, and he led a meditation with plants?
Oh yeah, I remember I ended up sitting under an olive tree.
So I was trying to remember what he said.
It was springtime in Tuscany.
I was under this almond tree.
It was in bloom, covered in delicate pink flowers.
The grass was full of tiny daisies.
And the instructions were to find a plant you like and go sit with it for, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes.
Do you remember what we were supposed to do then?
I think we were supposed to say hello.
Okay.
And then just observe.
Oh, and we were supposed to ask a very simple question.
Where do you end and I begin?
You're asking the plant.
And when your mind wanders, just come gently back to that question.
And I mean, I don't know what your experience was like.
For me, it was magical.
It was pretty great for me.
But so what made it so memorable?
I felt like the boundaries that separate me from the rest of the world kind of softened and dissolved.
My ego, my sense of self receded.
And for just this little bit of time, I was just blue sky and a living branch of pink almond blossoms.
It was such a relief to not be me anymore, even just for a few minutes.
Yeah.
Well, that seems like a great way to end this episode.
And if you want to try it, tell us about it.
You can write to us and describe what your experience was like.
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Wonder Cabinet comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin, and Versher, Vermont, our two homes.
Our audio engineer is Steve Gotcher.
Our digital guru is Mark Rickers.
Be well, and join us again next time.