David George Haskell wants you to “be a bee.” Not in terms of dressing up in a black-and-yellow costume and making buzzing noises—although he is an inveterate embracer of whimsy and creativity, and surely would support such endeavors—but in terms of really delving into flowers, literally and conceptually, and enriching our lives and the world around us by sharing what we’ve experienced and learned.
Fortunately for the floral-curious among us, the award-winning author and biologist has written How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries, a fascinating and revelatory book that educates, advocates and celebrates all at once.
In his preface, Haskell explains that flowers made their debut 200 million years ago and, by 100 million years ago, “created habitats like tropical rain forests and prairies, and catalyzed the evolution and diversification of bees, butterflies, birds, mammals, and many other animals.” It follows, he believes, that flowers “belong at the center of the story of how our world came to be.”
Fittingly, when BookPage spoke with Haskell on a call to his Atlanta home, he said, “I really think of Atlanta as a city of flowers, because there’s something blooming in every season of the year. The camellia bushes in my neighborhood are in full bloom right now.” And, he added, “Just yesterday, I went for a walk and saw that the chickweed growing on the side of the road is starting to bloom, too.” January is “insanely early for chickweed to be out, but it’s been very warm here lately. It’s another example of flowering plants adapting themselves to recent conditions.”
“I grew up in a culture that was extremely binary and very homophobic. . . . For a male-identifying person to express any interest in flowers would literally get you beaten up.”
As for Haskell’s recent conditions, after working as a professor at Tennessee’s University of the South, commonly known as Sewanee, for 29 years, he became an adjunct professor at Atlanta’s Emory University in 2025. “I left Sewanee so I could focus more on writing and creative projects,” he explains.
That’s an eminently sensible plan for someone who was named a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize with his very first book-length writerly outing, The Forest Unseen: a Year’s Watch in Nature, published in 2012. Haskell’s 2017 The Songs of Trees: Stories From Nature’s Great Connectors won the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished natural history writing, and he was a Pulitzer finalist a second time for 2022’s Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction. His books have won numerous other prestigious awards as well; he has degrees from the University of Oxford (a bachelor’s degree in zoology) and Cornell (a doctorate in evolutionary biology); and he’s a fellow of multiple learned societies.
Suffice to say, Haskell more than knows what he’s talking about. And he wants us to know amazing things about flowers, to feel the joy and sensory delight that he does. He believes that “getting people to engage the whole body with the world is really, really important” in pursuit of such goals, a practice he honed during his teaching years when he would “take students outside a lot, whether or not we were studying biology. There’s always a good story happening outside.” He adds, “It makes teaching fun, and hopefully makes learning fun for the students. But I think it’s also a fundamental lesson that we need to honor our intellect but also unite the intellect with the emotions and the senses, and that’s when we become whole people.”
That mind-body connection is evident throughout How Flowers Made Our World, in which Haskell explores the fascinating particulars of eight flowering plants—magnolias, goatsbeard (which he calls a “crazy punk dandelion”), orchids, grass, seagrass, roses, tea and pansies—and links each flower’s history to relevant present-day concerns. His writing is scholarly and also sensual, sweeping in scope yet appealingly personal as well. He muses on his personal history with flowers, and visits places like the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens in New York City, the Chelsea Flower Show in London, the herbarium at Washington State University and the International Perfume Museum Gardens in southern France.
He also, per a recent Instagram reel, “read 500 papers about flowers and floral evolution so you didn’t have to.” Among the gems mined from this work are fascinating revelations about seagrasses, flowering ocean-dwelling plants that over time transformed into “nurseries for young fish and invertebrates, and feeding places for larger sea animals such as birds, turtles, and mammals.” Haskell also poses the question, “Are orchids scam artists?” having learned that his favorite orchid, the fly orchid, not only imitates the aroma of female wasps but also resembles them, “a manikin sculpted by evolution to besot male wasps.”
And in a chapter called “Speculative Futures,” he contemplates “In what ways might [flowers’] special qualities contribute to the vitality and diversity of the planet in the future?” For example, might the sea campion’s return to old mining sites in the U.K., thus “restoring blooms to poisoned lands,” offer hope for our beleaguered, mistreated planet? Haskell thinks so, with reservations. “It’s just shocking . . . this soil is so poisoned, nothing grows there. And yet here are these flowers that have figured out through genetic innovation, ‘We can thrive here.’ The fact that they are bringing bees and things back to this desolate landscape . . . feels like the kind of hope we need more of.” But, he cautions, “There are only one or two plants that have figured out how to do this so far, whereas what was there before were hundreds of species of plants. So it’s a living hope, but it’s the first stage of hope. What’s even more hopeful is not trashing the land to start with.”
Read our starred review of ‘How Flowers Made Our World’ by David George Haskell.
And consider the pansy chapter, in which Haskell chronicles the development of the horticultural trade, from breeding practices to worker exploitation to pesticide use. “The business of growing and selling flowers, whether cut flowers or flowers for gardens, is a bit of a dichotomy,” he explains in our conversation. “One part of it is going very much in an ecological direction, emphasizing native plants, organic growing.” On the flip side, “the horticultural trade that’s providing cut flowers to the supermarket and so on is still very much dependent on [harmful] chemicals.” He adds, “Bringing to the surface some of these tensions is important so we can make thoughtful decisions about how we want to participate in a floral planet.”
When we envision dinosaurs roaming said planet, we typically don’t ponder the flowers with which they coexisted. But in his magnolia chapter, Haskell shares that “When Tyrannosaurus stomped through the subtropical forests of the late Cretaceous, magnolia-like plants had been thriving for fifty or more million years.” We get to engage with their descendants, flowers “little changed in their overall structure from more ancient times.” How can this be? Well, “Within a few million years of flowers’ appearance [on Earth] . . . the family tree of flowering plants splayed into almost all of the main branches that are still with us today. After this initial frenzy of diversification, evolution calmed down, producing new floral diversity at a more leisurely pace.”
After viewing floral evolution through a magnolia lens, Haskell writes of an especially gorgeous blossom in his neighborhood that he visits to bring things full circle. He deeply inhales the flower’s aroma, and “the experience knocks me sideways for a few seconds, retexturing my consciousness.” And then, “A few moments later, I’ve come down. I’m a pathetic huffer lurking in my neighbors’ hedging.”
It’s an evocative description, hilariously put. (No need to worry, Haskell quips: “Luckily, I live in a friendly neighborhood, so I don’t think I’ll get in too much trouble.”) But it’s also a springboard for sharing floral knowledge in a way that’s close to his heart. Haskell’s all-in approach to plant appreciation comes naturally: “I came from a family with a lot of very keen gardeners, so we’d grow flowers and vegetables and so on,” says the London-born, Paris-raised author. “It was only in the last decade that flowers really, to use a horrible pun, bloomed in my life . . . maybe because as we get older, we need more experiences of beauty and joy, and the flowers are a good way of getting that.”
But, he continues, “Honestly, for me, it’s a gendered thing. I grew up in a culture that was extremely binary and very homophobic. Not my family, but my schooling and even my undergraduate days, and so for a male-identifying person to express any interest in flowers would literally get you beaten up. I hope we are moved on from that, although I think our culture may be moving in the wrong direction on some fronts.” Nonetheless, “I was in my 30s and then later on, and I was like, Why am I shutting myself off from this and thinking that flowers are girly, that I can’t enjoy them?”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Haskell adds that “some of that [affinity for flowers] came through my nose. If you ask my mother, she’ll tell you I would go round and sniff everything. I would get a book, and the first thing I’d do is open it and smell it because every book has a different aroma. I’d go to a store and be smelling not just the spice jars, but all the foods.” He adds with a laugh, “I probably was a very difficult kid to be around, but I was guided by my nose.”
With How Flowers Made Our World, Haskell is guiding readers toward a new understanding of flowers’ biological primacy and prevalence, not to mention their beauty as experienced by all of our senses. To aid in their appreciation, he extends “Invitations to Play with Flowers” at the book’s end.
“For me, that’s a really important part of the book,” Haskell says. “Grow a garden, make some perfume at home or press a flower between the pages of a book. All of these things are ways of drawing people into that lived experience of being around flowers and understanding flowers, and if I can offer that to some readers, that would make me really happy.”
Photo of David George Haskell © Katherine Lehman