Happy Aloha Friday gang!  I have a special article today for everyone. From the incredible people @ National Geographic, here is a truely interesting article about how flowering plants have sculpted our reality on planet Earth.

By Michael Klesius



Essential to life—and to romance—flowering plants lure paleobotanists with the sweet mystery of their origin.

In the summer of 1973 sunflowers appeared in my father’s vegetable garden. They seemed to sprout overnight in a few rows he had lent that year to new neighbors from California. Only six years old at the time, I was at first put off by these garish plants. Such strange and vibrant flowers seemed out of place among the respectable beans, peppers, spinach, and other vegetables we had always grown. Gradually, however, the brilliance of the sunflowers won me over. Their fiery halos relieved the green monotone that by late summer ruled the garden. I marveled at birds that clung upside down to the shaggy, gold disks, wings fluttering, looting the seeds. Sunflowers defined flowers for me that summer and changed my view of the world.

Flowers have a way of doing that. They began changing the way the world looked almost as soon as they appeared on Earth about 130 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period. That’s relatively recent in geologic time: If all Earth’s history were compressed into an hour, flowering plants would exist for only the last 90 seconds. But once they took firm root about 100 million years ago, they swiftly diversified in an explosion of varieties that established most of the flowering plant families of the modern world.

Today flowering plant species outnumber by twenty to one those of ferns and cone-bearing trees, or conifers, which had thrived for 200 million years before the first bloom appeared. As a food source flowering plants provide us and the rest of the animal world with the nourishment that is fundamental to our existence. In the words of Walter Judd, a botanist at the University of Florida, “If it weren’t for flowering plants, we humans wouldn’t be here.”

From oaks and palms to wildflowers and water lilies, across the miles of cornfields and citrus orchards to my father’s garden, flowering plants have come to rule the worlds of botany and agriculture. They also reign over an ethereal realm sought by artists, poets, and everyday people in search of inspiration, solace, or the simple pleasure of beholding a blossom.

“Before flowering plants appeared,” says Dale Russell, a paleontologist with North Carolina State University and the State Museum of Natural Sciences, “the world was like a Japanese garden: peaceful, somber, green; inhabited by fish, turtles, and dragonflies. After flowering plants, the world became like an English garden, full of bright color and variety, visited by butterflies and honeybees. Flowers of all shapes and colors bloomed among the greenery.”

Full Article Here – Subscribe to National Geographic magazine.

Flowering plants depend on everything from mammals to trickery in order to get pollinated. In Madagascar the traveler’s tree is pollinated by the ruffed lemur and has evolved huge white flowers that support the weight of this almost ten-pound (five-kilogram) primate. Enticed by copious nectar that drips from the flowers—lemurs appear to be dependent on the plant’s nectar for food at certain times of the year—they carry pollen on their fur as they move from flower to flower.While nectar is often offered as a reward to pollinators in exchange for pollen dispersal, some species of flowering plants offer no reward at all. Instead they dupe their pollinators with an enticing fragrance, shape, or color. In western Australia a species of hammer orchid has petals that mimic the shape and color of a female wasp and even produces an odor that mimics the smell of a female wasp. In response to these chemical and visual signals, the male wasp attempts to mate with the dummy female. In seizing the orchid flower, the male wasp triggers the hammer mechanism and gets pollen whapped on its back. When the wasp visits the next hammer orchid, it unknowingly distributes the pollen.

—Nora Gallagher