The Reason For Flowers Book Summary - The Reason For Flowers Book explained in key points

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The Reason For Flowers summary

Name: The Reason For Flowers
Rating: 4.2 (62 reviews)
Author: Stephen Buchmann

Stephen Buchmann

Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives

4.2 (62 ratings)

21 mins

What is The Reason For Flowers about?

The Reason for Flowers (2015) is about the origin, reproduction and effects of these amazing pieces of evolutionary artwork. These blinks explain how flowers have sex, why they’re so beautiful and why humans have become so infatuated with them.

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The Reason For Flowers
summarized in 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Understand our age-old love affair with flowers.

Imagine someone offered you a deal: you will become fabulously rich overnight and never suffer a single insect bite again – under the sole condition that your life will be devoid of flowers, real or artificial, from now on. Would you accept?

If you’re hesitating, you wouldn’t be the only one. Humans love and crave flowers, and we always have. In antiquity, people in barren deserts covered their homes with floral-patterned rugs to cheer themselves up throughout their flowerless existence. And today, we buy flowers like crazy: in the United States alone, people buy 10 million cut stems a day!

But what is it about flowers that makes them so irresistible, to us and so many animals as well? How have flowers come to shape our culture? And what are they good for anyway? These are just some of the questions you’ll find answered in these blinks.

You’ll also learn

why some bees take showers in an orchid;
about the secret language of flowers; and
about the perfect flower for a break-up.

The reproduction of flowering plants is highly dependent on pollinators.

When you look out your window, even in the city, you’re bound to see some of nature’s beauty, and among the most beautiful innovation of the natural world are those remarkable bursts of color we call flowers.

But despite their tremendous beauty, flowers have a major problem:

Flowering plants can’t survive on their own, and instead depend on pollinators for their procreation. These are generally flying insects like bees, beetles and butterflies – but to understand the relationship between these winged critters and plants, we first need to learn more about how flower sex works.

Plants that produce flowers are, for the most part, hermaphroditic, meaning that a single plant has both male and female reproductive parts. The pollen grains and ovules, the plant equivalents of sperm and eggs, are held in the plant’s flowers, essentially making flowers a plant’s sex organ.

But when one plant wants to have sex with another, they encounter an issue: they can’t move! And to make matters more difficult, plants, like humans and other animals, are best off mating with unrelated members of their species to increase their genetic diversity and vitality. So, how do you have sex with someone who’s far away when you can’t move an inch?

Through bees and butterflies! After all, not only can these insects move, they fly. This makes them perfect for the role of transporting pollen grains from one flower to another and impregnating other plants in the process.

But this all doesn’t happen by sheer coincidence; it’s partly a flower’s beauty that helps it coax pollinators into this deal, which is exactly what we’ll explore next.

Flowers attract their pollinators and make the exchange worth their while.

So, bees and butterflies lend a hand to their immobilized flowering friends, but this impulse isn’t purely altruistic. In fact, flowers reward pollinating insects handsomely for their services.

Flowers are like a kind of café or rest stop for insects where they can eat, drink and take a break. Not only that, but flowers are also an ideal location for insects to find mates and, in colder parts of the world, the inside of a blossom can even be comfortably warm.

In evolutionary terms, flowering plants are young but tremendously successful.

Earth wasn’t always the lush, green home we enjoy today. Five hundred million years ago, while the sea was crawling with life, the land on Earth was a barren expanse of rock and desert. In fact, plants only came into existence around 472 million years ago, and it wasn’t for another 300 million years that they began producing flowers.

So, it took a while for plants to emerge on land and, when they did, it was in or around water. These early plants included a single-celled algae that allowed moss-like organisms to spread across the earth’s dry surface, competing for light and space, some of which evolved into ferns.

While humans have loved and cultivated flowers since ancient times, crossbreeding is relatively new.

Enough gossiping about floral sexuality – let’s take a look at the special relationship that we have with flowers.

We all know that humans grow, breed, smell, eat, sell and buy flowers, arranging them in bouquets and planting them in gardens. Virtually every culture known to man has held flowering plants in high esteem, and even our early ancestors used flowers in burials and cultivated them in gardens.

Flowers provide us with food and perfumes.

Most people enjoy looking at flowers, but would you eat one?

Well, you might be surprised to hear it, but lots of the food you eat is actually derived from flowers, which can come in many different forms. For instance, both broccoli and cauliflower, though posing convincingly as vegetables, are essentially flower blooms that have yet to unfurl.

Flowers have left their mark on human culture.

Every year, as Valentine’s day rolls around, flower shops see a massive spike in their profits. People flock to buy bouquets that communicate things like love and affection because flowers mean something to us.

But this meaning pales in comparison to the elaborate art practiced during the eighteenth and nineteenth century of using flowers to send secret messages. It’s true – there was an absolute obsession with using flowers as secret codes to communicate with lovers or friends. It began in Paris in 1819 with the publication of a book called Le Langage des Fleurs, which detailed the symbolic meaning of individual flowers as well as that of bouquets.

Plants sparked scientific discoveries and progress.

So, everyone from artists to Jesus Christ have been fascinated by flowers and other plants, but plants have also been essential to scientific discoveries. For instance, the observation of the manner in which plants are distributed across the globe led to a major breakthrough in the fields of geography.

In the eighteenth century, explorer-scientists and plant collectors roamed the world, noticing that the flora varied tremendously from one continent to another. In fact, the plants in Australia were so different to the ones in North America that, to their discoverers, they looked as if they’d been created by different gods.

Nature, and flowers in particular, enhance our well-being.

Have you ever wondered why humans are so fond of parks? In cities, for instance, space is hard to come by and tends to be very expensive; the real estate value of New York’s Central Park would be an absolute fortune! But city dwellers insist on maintaining their access to parks. Why?

One explanation might be biophilia, a term that describes the natural human desire to be in nature and our propensity to gravitate toward green settings and flowers. This trait was inherited from our early ancestors who lived in the African savannah. After all, in a desert like that, an attraction to green space boosted our species’ chances of survival because vegetation is a sign of water and food.

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Best quote from The Reason For Flowers

Plants are sexual organisms, but they lead sedentary lives and move on a timescale much too slow for us to notice.

—Stephen Buchmann

About the Author

Biologist Stephen Buchmann has been a passionate bee and bug watcher since his youth. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona, with a specialization in pollination ecology. Buchmann is the author of eleven books, including The Forgotten Pollinators, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Who should read The Reason For Flowers?

Anyone interested in the cultural history of flowers
Every florist or admirer of flower arrangement
Flower enthusiasts of all types

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