The birth of perfume is often traced to a city called Grasse in the south of France, which was known for leather tanning in the Middle Ages. In the 16th century, some leatherworkers there began using oils steeped in flower aromas to impart scent to gloves. These perfumed gloves, boosted by the queen of France, Catherine de Medici, became fashionable with the royalty and nobility in Europe. King Louis XIV became known as “le doux fleurant” (the gentle, sweet flowery one) for his love of perfume. Soon the perfume market replaced the tanneries in Grasse and today the town is almost universally recognized as the world’s perfume capital. This is just one of many stories about flowers that David George Haskell recounts in his new book How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries.
But as Haskell points out, the origins of perfume are actually so much older than the scented gloves from Grasse. Bees and other pollinators have been using the aromas of flowers to scent themselves—and woo mates—for eons, he writes. Haskell’s larger argument is that flowers are neither as ephemeral nor ornamental as we often think. Both in the evolution of life on this planet, and in human culture, flowers have been a critical engine of connection and cooperation, Haskell writes.
The book is part travelogue, part history, part ecology, part manifesto: He wants humans to change our relationship to the natural world—from a posture of domination and control to one that honors our interdependency with the many forms of life—plant, animal, and microbe—around us. This, Haskell believes, is the prerequisite to solving huge, existential problems: not just climate change and environmental destruction, but also political conflict and instability around the world.
“Garden design and the tending of flowers seem, at first, sideshows, perhaps even decadent distractions, in the face of the mounting crises of our world,” he writes. “Yet, crisis demands radical cultural change.” I talked with Haskell about why he sees flowers as revolutionaries, why humans are a “floral species,” and whether their rise in the evolutionary history of Earth is still an “abominable mystery,” as Darwin once put it.
You call flowers “revolutionaries” in the title of your book. Why did you choose that word to describe them?
These creatures opened massive possibilities as they evolved, not just for themselves, but for other creatures. They transformed the foundation of life on Earth. For example, there were no rainforests before there were flowering plants. There were no prairies. These really important ecosystems could not exist without flowering plants. They also had a biophysical effect on the entire climate. One of the things flowering plants did was increase the productivity of what is known as transpiration, the movement of water from the soil into the air.
Biologists call the time when flowering plants evolved the Cretaceous terrestrial revolution. But I think that's too modest because, for one thing, flowering plants revolutionized the world after the Cretaceous period. And it wasn't just on land. When you look at the edges of the continent, seagrasses and mangroves and salt marshes, some of the most important habitats in terms of climate regulation and nurseries for sea fishes and invertebrates are made by flowering plants. Some of these flowering plants actually make their flowers underwater in the salt water, which to me is kind of mind-blowing.
I also like the word revolutionary because it has a particular cultural meaning within human societies that flowering plants subvert. We often think of human revolutions as being violent, whereas flowering plants use beauty and cooperation and illusion. I mean, there's a fair amount of deception happening with flowers and their relationships to others, which I find interesting and deliciously complicated. So reframing what revolution is, I think is an interesting idea.
The book positions humans as "a floral species." Can you unpack what you mean by that: How are humans fundamentally shaped by flowers?
There are two main ways in which I mean that, and one is that humans would not exist without flowering plants. We're primates and the first primates evolved to climb up trees and eat fruits and eat the insects that are feeding on flowering plants. Primates probably wouldn't have evolved without flowering plants. But more recently, our hominid ancestors came out of the forest. We came down from the trees into the savannas and grasslands. And grasslands are habitats built entirely by flowering plants. Grasses are one very specialized and hugely successful group of flowering plants. It was the evolution of grasses that created opportunities for our ancestors to become bipedal and to depend on the big animals that ate those grasses. We really were a grassland species for millions of years.
That continues to the present day after the agricultural revolution in many parts of the world because the foundational foods of human agriculture are grasses: maize, rice, and wheat form 60 percent of all calories that we eat. Sugar cane, barley, millet, these are all other grasses that are really important.
I kind of jokingly write in the book that if we named ourselves for the food that we eat, we'd be the grass apes, Homo poaceae. We really don't think of ourselves as completely dependent on grass, but our relationship with flowering plants like grasses is what catalyzed the evolution of humanity and sustains us today.
There's a second way in which we're a floral species, and this is not about how we evolve or what we eat, but how we express ourselves and how we relate to one another. When we bury somebody, we often bring flowers to the grave or the funeral. When we are wooing someone, we offer a bouquet. When people get married, there are showers of petals. In many religious traditions, flowers are brought to the altar or are used in worship. And of course, we spend a lot of time gardening and devoting our labor to making flowering plants happy. When we want to express our individuality, we perfume ourselves often with the aromas of flowers.
Read more: “Why Is Everything an Orchid?”
Darwin famously called the sudden appearance and dominance of flowering plants an “abominable mystery.” Does your book offer a resolution to Darwin's puzzle, or does the mystery remain abominable?
You’ve got to love Darwin for his spirited expression. That quote comes from a letter to British botanist Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, who lived at the same time as Darwin in England. Darwin was just despairing. Why did flowering plants suddenly explode onto the scene late? Why and how?
There is still mystery, though it's not quite such an abomination. Back in Darwin's time, in the late 1800s, they had discovered few fossils. Now we've got a much more fine-grained view. We have some early fossils from almost 130 million years ago, and we can piece together the evolution of some of the early groups of flowering plants. But the fossil record for flowers is still poor because flowers are so delicate.
The other thing that Darwin didn't know about, of course, was modern genetics, and that helps to shine a big spotlight onto the mystery. We now know that flowering plants appeared quite suddenly. They evolved and then 10 million years later, they'd taken over a lot of the planet and many of the major groups of flowering plants were already established. How did they do that?
One way is through genetic storms, where you observe the doubling of the entire genome or doublings of huge chunks of the genome, which provides massive amounts of raw material for evolution to play with. So instead of having just two copies of every gene, suddenly these plants have four or six copies. And the two of them can just do the work of running the plant. That means you've got extras that can mutate and evolve new aromas or come up with new ways of building xylem, the vascular tissue that transports water and minerals from the roots to the stems and leaves. Essentially it's this big party, almost like a rave, where all this experimentation is happening.
What geneticists have discovered is that before the evolution of flowering plants, there was one such genetic storm. And then there have been others repeatedly through time that have increased diversity and allowed plants to make it through really challenging times. And these genetic storms are still happening today. Scientists have studied them in the field and in the lab. I think if Darwin knew about this, he would be really excited.
You mention that flowers shaped modern science in ways both "marvelous and, sometimes, unjust." Can you elaborate on the unjust aspects?
It's more than unjust, it's horrifically wrong. This is a story that centers mostly on Carl Linnaeus, who is the biologist who in the 1700s came up with the method of classification of life that we still use today.
Linnaeus was totally obsessed with flowering plants. He collected them. He studied them. He came from a quite poor background and in many ways was self-taught in his botanical knowledge. And he developed his classification scheme first based on studying flowering plants.
To this day, botanists still root all of the original scientific names of plants back to Linnaeus. Of course, many of them have been updated and Linnaeus had lots of the relationships and the families wrong. But he produced a classification of orders and families and species and so on based on flowers.
He then applied that classification to other species, to animals, including humans. And in a way, he was fairly progressive in that he regarded humans as actual animals. He classified us within the primates, which, you know, biologists would agree with that.
Unfortunately, he also, within humans, divided humans into different groupings. And he did it according to what we would now call race. He used very simple sort of color classifications, and then ascribed particular moral and behavioral characters to different races. And being a white guy, he thought the whites were the smartest and most morally upright.
Because he was so well known and was regarded as the living authority on classifying life, that classification, which is completely not based on any evidence whatsoever, then became part of the foundation of modern biology. So the study of flowers revolutionized not just the scientific study of biology in ways that I would argue are quite useful, but also, unfortunately, put some white supremacist racist ideas into the founding documents of the science of biology.
We see modern manifestations of this happening now all the time. People misuse scientific terms and scientific ideas to put a veneer of objectivity on fundamentally non-scientific and racist ideas.
Flowers essentially seduced their pollinators. They used beauty to transform enemies into allies. You write that this teaches us something fundamental: that "thriving worlds grow from cooperation, mediated by beauty." That's such a provocative idea. How do you see beauty functioning as a mediator beyond the plant world?
I taught undergraduates for many decades and it struck me how little we talk about beauty in the science classroom. I think that's problematic because we can pretend that we're not motivated by beauty, but we're deceiving ourselves. A deep experience of beauty is when our intellects, our emotions, our senses, everything we've learned from our culture all come together to produce a really deeply moving, informative experience that guides us. It guides our intellect, it guides our emotions, it guides our values. It can be a foundation for ethics. I think that's worth talking about in the classroom.
In some of my previous books, I developed this idea about ethics and beauty a little more. But I think flowers are a powerful example of how beauty is not just this ephemeral fuzz in animal minds that just goes away. No, experiences of beauty are catalytic, they're creative, they build ecosystems, and they could potentially be deeply informative if we were to pay attention to them.
There's a thread in the book about how shifting our relationship with flowers can help us solve some of the world's toughest problems. That feels like a big leap—from tending to a rose to addressing environmental problems like climate change. Can you unpack that connection for us?
I would flip that around and ask, if we are not in living embodied relationships with other creatures on the planet, what hope have we got of being good neighbors and kin? The foundation of right action has to be a lived relationship. And the nature of that relationship can be really different for different people.
If I was sitting on the board of a timber corporation, for example, I would think it would be the responsibility of board members to spend time in the forests that they're making decisions about. Not because the forest is going to somehow mysteriously speak to you and tell you the answer. But if all you're looking at is spreadsheets, you are cutting yourself out from all the sensory data that is coming in from thousands of species that live in the forest. And this is one reason why forests are in crisis today. Forest managers, whether from timber corporations or big multinational conservation groups, have almost no lived experience in the ecosystems that they're presuming to manage. And so, if we want to be good stewards and kin and neighbors to the living earth community, we have to have practices of getting outside, getting off our screens, getting our hands in the soil.
Most of us are not sitting on the board of timber corporations, but we do have the possibility of putting a window box out or tending our backyard or belonging to a community garden. And alone, those actions are not going to solve all of the world's problems. Of course not. So they're not sufficient, but they are necessary. Because I think if we are trying to solve problems by just locking ourselves in seminar rooms under fluorescent lights, we are not going to be coming up with the right answers to how to live well on this planet. 
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