Alpine Colorado lupine (Lupinus argenteus)
Alpine Colorado lupine (Lupinus argenteus)
A temple priest in ancient Egypt prepares an infusion of precious saffron fibers, the dried and twisted stigmas of Crocus sativus, as a bitter-tasting medicine for stomach and intestinal ailments, or applied as a poultice. Cleopatra had saffron added to her bathwater and ate saffron in the hopes that it would make her romantic encounters with men even more pleasurable. Women in China prepare floral teas of chrysanthemum and sweet osmanthus blooms with green tea leaves, during the mid-autumn festival in southern China. The intensely apricot-flavored hot tea is thought to improve the complexion and also treat cancers and diabetes. A mother in India applies a bandage rich in honey, herbs, and dried flowers to a cut on her son’s leg, knowing that it will heal faster. A US gardener enjoys the sunshine and gentle summer breezes of her garden among the carnations and dahlias. She bends to harvest a cup of chamomile flowers to make an herbal-tea sleep aid. People from different cultures and times have always used traditional knowledge about flowers to promote their health and happiness.
Humans evolved on the African continent. We survived by gathering and hunting food, locating water, and finding shelter. We respond strongly to elements of the savanna environments in which our earliest ancestors lived. This seems to be at least partially why we enjoy our parks and open spaces. These natural elements signaled the likelihood of finding food and water. Wildflowers may have predicted that edible fruits would soon follow. Blooming flowers signal a time of plenty and seasons of abundance. Flowers are a key element in human survival.
Humans have an inborn affinity for nature that goes beyond the tangible benefits we derive from the microbes, plants, and animals of the biomes in which we live. The idea that nature in the form of landscapes, plants, and animals is good for our well-being is old and can be traced to Charles Darwin or earlier. This idea was called biophilia by psychologist Erich Fromm and was studied by Harvard ant biologist Edward O. Wilson and Stephen Kellert. In 1984, Wilson published Biophilia, which was followed by another book, The Biophilia Hypothesis, edited by Kellert and Wilson, in 1995. Their biophilia hypothesis is that humans have a universal desire to be in natural settings.
This tendency is at least partially genetically determined. Kellert and Wilson concern themselves with natural physical environments, and plants, rather than animals. The notion of a love of nature, biophilia, makes sense because throughout our evolutionary history it has aided our survival. Biophilic affinities can be diminished, or lost, when natural areas, or our access to them, are reduced or eliminated. Biophilic tendencies have perhaps advanced our cultural evolution. The biophilia hypothesis also embraces flowers. Our love of flowers may be learned as well as being part of our deep ancestral genetic heritage.
Humans and the flowers of the garden have an even closer and mutually dependent relationship than we have ever imagined. Just as dangerous wolves were our camp followers waiting for food scraps and were eventually tamed—domesticated into the hundreds of familiar and friendly dog breeds we keep as pets and working dogs today—we can think of garden plants with their flowers as “companion plants” for people. Long ago, we began tending flowering plants. Unlike the hundred or so species of plants that were domesticated as major agricultural crop plants, those feeding the world’s 7 billion people, the garden blooms and other flowers offer us nothing in return. Or do they? Garden flowers, potted plants, and cut flowers improve our moods and raise our spirits. Perhaps there has been rapid coevolution between us and the flowers over the last ten millennia, a mutualistic dance in which both partners benefited, still evolving but transforming one another. Flowers always make us smile.
The dried, crimson threads of saffron have been used since antiquity as a flavoring for foods and beverages, and in dyes and medicines. Rumored to be an aphrodisiac, saffron was a favorite ingredient in love potions used by Egyptian pharaohs. The ancient Egyptians did not grow saffron but imported it from Crete. Since Greco-Roman times, fragrant saffron has been steeped in alcohol to produce medicines reputed to reduce fevers, cramps, enlarged livers, or to calm the nerves.
Pressed from the buds of clove trees, cloves are rich in the chemical eugenol. This molecule is used as a fragrant ingredient in potpourri bundles or as a component in perfumes. It is also a powerful antibiotic and painkiller for toothaches. Cloves are also widely used in traditional Chinese and Indian medicines.
Flower-based teas are reputed to have medicinal benefits. Previously, we encountered the dried flowers of chrysanthemum, jasmine, daylily, hibiscus, and fragrant olive (Osmanthus fragrans) as “flower bundles” used in Chinese teas. Chrysanthemum tea is popular in southern China. Flower teas are used to treat chest pain (angina), high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, fevers, colds, and headaches. In traditional Chinese medicine, osmanthus tea is reputed to improve the skin.
The West also has a tradition of flower remedies, but it is not as strong. Chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla) was used in Europe, and the practice spread to the western hemisphere after Columbus. Chamomile tea is made from the dried heads of the flower’s small, white and yellow blossoms (cousins of daisies and sunflowers). Chamomile is used for calming anxiety, for settling the stomach, and as a mild sedative taken at bedtime. In Spanish-speaking countries it is prized as an additive in cordials and liqueurs.
Flowering heads of pot or African marigold flowers (Calendula officinalis) have been prescribed to treat skin infections. The flowers and leaves seem to have astringent properties. African marigold appears to have an estrogen-like effect and has been used to lessen the pain and/or regulate bleeding during menstruation. If you are considering experimenting with these garden favorites, never confuse them with the Mexican marigolds (Tagetes lucida), which do not have the same properties. Numerous flowers have made the jump from food additives or teas to traditional medicinal treatments.
Perhaps you were thinking, “What about the medicinal effects of poppy flowers and opium?” Technically, the rubbery exudate harvested to produce opium and other alkaloid drugs comes later than the flowers, from the seed capsules (fruits) that develop from the ovaries of red opium poppy flowers (Papaver somniferum). Their medicinal use as painkillers predates written history. Along with the illegal drug heroin, other narcotic, pain-relieving drugs (e.g., morphine, codeine) are isolated from poppy fruits.
People have turned to plants, their stems, leaves, fruits, and seeds, for millennia as part of their healing pharmacopoeias for numerous ailments. They have also turned to flowers for their intrinsic healing properties. Along with traditional wisdom about medicinal plants transmitted orally by elders and shamanic healers, there is a rich tradition of information in herbals. Herbals are examples of incunabula (the first books created on printing presses after Gutenberg). A commonly heard complaint is that herbals were poorly illustrated books created by copycat monks. This is untrue for herbals produced during the Renaissance. Herbalists had to collect the plants themselves, so the herbals contained carefully executed woodcuts, often colored by hand, making it easier for plant collectors and healers to recognize them. Herbals were the forerunners of natural-history and botanical field guides illustrated with gorgeous paintings or color photographic plates.
In 1629, John Parkinson writes in his A Garden of Pleasant Flowers, for lilies, that “the water of the flowers distilled, is of excellent virtue for women in travel of childe bearing, to procure an earie delivery.” About primroses he says, “The juice of the flowers is commended to cleanse the spots or marks of the face, whereof some Gentlewomen have found good experience.” In 1633, John Gerard (in The Herbal, or General History of Plants) proclaims for rose water, “The juice of these roses, especially of Damask, doth move to the stoole, and maketh the belly soluble. . . . This syrup doth moisten and coole, and therefore it alayeth the extremities of heat in hot burning fevers.” In his Botanicum Officinale (1722), herbalist Joseph Miller states of pinks or carnations (Dianthus), “These flowers are cordial, cephalic, and of use in all diseases of the Head and Nerves, as well as in all Kind of Fevers, and of the malignnant Distempers, in Faintings and Palpitations of the Heart.” We could go on, with additional unsettling quotes, but you have the idea.
In Elizabeth Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal (1737), she mentions violet flowers as “one of the four cordial flowers: and esteemed cooling, moistning, and laxative, good in Affections of the Breast and Lungs, helping Coughs and Pleuretic Pains.” For primrose, she writes, “The Flowers are commended as good against disorders arising from Phlegmatic Humours,” while for foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) she says, “The late Doctor Hulze commends y Ointment made of Flowers and May Butter, for Srophulous Ulceres which run much, dressing them with the ointment. And purging two or three Times a Week with proper purges.” Foxglove is a genus of about twenty species. It has been used historically and recently for extracts such as digoxin, used to treat irregular heartbeats in human patients. For wild or briar rose (Rosa canina) Blackwell writes, “The Flowers of this Rose are thought more restringent than the Garden [rose]: Some look upon them as a specific for y Excess of y Catamenia.” Catamenia is an old word for “menses.”
Although technically not produced by flowers, honey is the concentrated, sweet floral nectar that is further processed by certain bees. Honeys have been used since antiquity especially for healing wounds, applied to cuts, scrapes, and burns. The Egyptian Ebers Papyrus (1550 BC) details 147 uses of honey as a medicine. These included treating burns and sores and wounds, along with surgical incisions, including male circumcision. Aristotle wrote about honey as a potent salve for wounds around 350 BC. The Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula keep colonies of stingless bees (e.g., Melipona beecheii, M. yucatanica, and Trigona spp.) in hollow logs for their honey and wax. These get my vote as the tastiest and most intensely floral honeys I’ve ever experienced. The Maya also used these native-bee honeys as treatments for cataracts and easing difficult childbirths.
All honeys have genuine healing and medicinal properties, but their therapeutic properties may vary by as much as a hundred fold. Bacteria shrivel up and die due to honey’s high sugar content (80 percent sugar, 20 percent water) compared to pure water. Honeys provide additional antimicrobial effects due to their low pH and peroxide content.
Honey bees (Apis mellifera) add enzymes during the transformation of nectar into honey. The enzyme glucose oxidase is found in all honeys and splits the sugar glucose into water and hydrogen peroxide, the powerful antiseptic you know from your medicine cabinet. Honey is useful for the treatment of puncture wounds and for second- and third-degree burns. Burn wards in some hospitals are beginning to use honeys to prevent sterile dressings from sticking to wounds and to promote faster healing with less scarring.
Manuka honey from New Zealand is prized for its healing properties. Sterile bandages are impregnated with manuka honey, which comes from the nectar of the white blossoms of the manuka or tea-tree (Leptospermum scoparium). Manuka bushes, which belong to the eucalyptus family (Myrtaceae), grow throughout New Zealand and southeastern Australia. European honey bees visit the flowers for nectar and make the highly viscous manuka honey, which has a strong flavor, an acquired taste. I prefer it as a medicine rather than spread across my breakfast toast.
The antibacterial component of manuka honey is likely due to methylglyoxal, along with other unknown molecules. Manuka honeys have been rated for their antibacterial activity via the UMF (Unique Manuka Factor), with a score of 10 considered the highest. In vitro studies of methylglyoxal indicate that it can be an effective against MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) bacteria. In 2008, a Cochrane Review (from cochrane.org, a high-ranking database for evidence-based medicine) found that manuka honey may improve healing of superficial burns when compared to sterile plain gauze dressings. Dr. Peter Molan, a researcher at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, has studied the medicinal properties of this honey for decades. Because of the high price of manuka honey, it is now counterfeited globally. Some brands are honey other than manuka, or manuka honey diluted with sugar syrup.
The healing power of flowers has advanced wound care. Contrary to the traditional wisdom of open-to-the-air wound care, moist and occlusive environments were found to be more conducive to healing. Honeys of many types, along with pure sugar, were tested by several companies as additives to these advanced wound-care dressings. Malignant wounds are routinely present in 5–10 percent of all cancer patients. At least one study showed the same efficacy for traditional silver-coated bandages and honey-coated bandages. Wound care, especially of foot ulcers, can be critical for diabetic patients, where limb amputations are likely. Derma Sciences Inc., a pharmaceutical company focused on wound care, manufactures Medihoney therapeutic products, including manuka-honey-infused sterile bandages.
In hospitals throughout the ages, flowers or products derived from flowers have been used to treat people suffering from various maladies. Now it appears that hospitalized patients heal faster and with fewer complications if their rooms look out upon trees and lawns, or if they have cut flowers in their rooms. Just giving someone flowers, or inhaling their sweet aromas, makes us smile and promotes elevated moods, positive thoughts, and eases social encounters. Certain memories can be triggered by scents, thus floral scents or perfumes can often help us recall people, places, and events. The belief that plants are beneficial for medical patients is at least one thousand years old. In Europe, during the Middle Ages, monks in monasteries built beautiful gardens to soothe and comfort the ill. Similarly, American and European hospitals of the 1800s frequently used gardens as architectural elements for healing patients. Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), the social reformer and founder of modern nursing, may have introduced this concept of healing plants during her nightly rounds.
Modern US hospitals have largely abandoned outdoor greenery since pay parking lots are more lucrative. Roger Ulrich was one of the first to experimentally document the health benefits of being outside, or simply viewing nature through a window. In his study “View through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery,” published in 1984, Ulrich analyzed hospital patients following a surgical procedure. Some patients in a Pennsylvania hospital had windows that looked upon trees and lawns, while others saw featureless brick walls. Patients whose rooms looked upon an anthropogenic version of nature had shorter postoperative hospital stays, complained less to their nurses, and required fewer moderate or strong medications for pain. Flowers are often the primary gifts given to hospital patients, and for good reasons.
Some American hospitals have heeded this message. In St. Louis, the eight thousand square feet of the Olsen family rooftop garden occupies much of the eighth floor of their Children’s Hospital. It features flower beds, fountains, ponds, and benches. This special area offers a place for children to heal and for worried parents to seek comfort, companionship, and an opportunity to reflect.
Inhalation of floral volatiles has been shown to decrease sympathetic neural activity in adults, often lowering their blood pressure. Inhaling the fragrance of a rose, caused a 40 percent decrease in relative sympathetic activity (the so-called fight-or-flight response), and a 30 percent decrease in adrenaline production, by human subjects. Flowers unknowingly excite or calm us with their fragrances. Or maybe they do know. Now that we grow and breed flowers by the billions, perhaps they have begun to turn their scented charms upon us, as a newly evolved part of their complex strategies for reproduction and survival.
It has been suggested that flowers may emit mood-altering chemicals similar to anxiolytics, which are antipanic or antianxiety psychoactive agents. These could imitate the commonly prescribed drug diazepam. If so, floral biologists haven’t identified them in their analyses. Since the intended receivers of floral volatiles are pollinators, not humans, it’s interesting to speculate if flowers are trying to sedate, calm, or slow down their pollen taxis, as has been suggested for narcotic-acting alkaloids in Datura nectar and their presumed affects on moth visitors. Perhaps calmed (drugged) insects at flowers are more likely to linger and thereby transfer additional pollen to the next flowers as they forage.
Can the scent of a flower be therapeutic? Humans apparently secrete chemicals into the air when they are happy, fearful, angry, or anxious. These molecules are released by our epidermal glands. They channel our emotions and affect nearby individuals. Indoor air can be considered happy, fearful, or angry based on semiochemicals left behind by emotional residents. It is believed that people who sniff these leftover chemical messengers respond subconsciously to these messages. A few studies have been conducted in this fascinating new area of human behavioral responses. Perhaps large fragrance companies are at this very moment conducting research on how to affect our moods and desires by managing our indoor air so as to enhance their bottom lines. At least one Japanese company enriched the air in its corporate offices with stimulating botanical scents. They used citrus in the morning, followed by cedar and cypress fragrances later in the day, to reduce worker stress levels. The chemically augmented air was claimed to increase worker productivity and corporate profits. For now, I think I’ll use bouquets of fresh flowers set out on my dining-room table.
Odors in the environment, such as those from plants and their flowers, can influence our moods and health. A reduction in human stress hormones was noticed by researchers when subjects were exposed to citrus odors, and to essential oils made from fragrant roses. Some people during massage treatments or aromatherapy experience a calming effect when exposed to flower scents.
In a psychological study by Rutgers researcher Jeannette Haviland-Jones, subjects were exposed to low concentrations of odors experienced subliminally so that the subjects would not be able to consciously recognize a particular odor. The subliminal odors included Chanel No. 5 perfume, Johnson & Johnson baby powder, and the floral scents of roses and gardenias. Participants used significantly more “enjoyment words” if true flower scents were present. The low-concentration floral odors increased feelings of enjoyment compared to air infused with synthetic perfumes or baby powders. Confronted by a stranger, participants who were exposed to floral odors were almost three times as likely to approach and touch the stranger compared to those subjects breathing synthetic odors. These findings were similar to Haviland-Jones’s previous research when subjects were exposed to floral bouquets.
These clinical studies suggest that the ancient and current widespread use of decorative flowers, at home and in social gatherings, makes sense. At least since the Persians and the Egyptians, pleasant floral odors, even below perceptible concentrations, may have encouraged positive moods and socially responsible behaviors among people. Maybe from now on we will consider “healthy air” to be room or outdoor air that has been florally scented.
Now may be a good time to introduce a bit of caution. There are two kinds of modern aromatherapy. Flower-scented oils used in massages combined with other therapeutic techniques probably have positive effects on our health and moods and likely cause no harm. However, aromatherapist claims that by smelling certain essences you can be cured of specific conditions such as the plague, cancer, malaria, etc., are almost certainly false. Many unsupported claims are routinely made for scented products in human healing and welfare. Use caution and common sense when using these substances.
When you present people with a flower or a bouquet, their first reaction is to bring the blossoms close to their face and smell them. While they are inhaling the pleasant aroma, their lips part and they flash a knowing, toothy smile, the kind referred to by researchers as a genuine or Duchenne smile. Psychological research is yielding tantalizing glimpses into our long associations with flowers. Flowers evoke positive psychological responses, promote happiness, decrease social distance, enhance our living and work spaces, and may play a role in improving our long-term memories.
Öhman, Dimberg, and Öst in their 1985 study used photographs of snakes as possible fear stimuli, and pictures of flowers for possible neutral stimuli. However, they found that flowers were not neutral at all. Subjects viewing the floral images produced zygomatic muscle activity (smiles), which they reported as positive responses. The researchers may have been some of the first to experimentally study the human response when viewing or being given flowers.
Selfishly, we believe that humans are in control of everything that happens. We believe we manage plant and animal domestication. Ten thousand years ago, inhabitants within the Fertile Crescent domesticated grasses, peas, olive trees, and many of the animals that feed us. We enjoy the fruits and seeds of animal-pollinated crops (apples, pears, pumpkins, cherries, etc.), contributing about 35 percent of the annual global human diet. We plant them, they grow and bear fruit, end of story, right? Well, maybe not. A number of scientists believe that flowering plants have more control over us than we think. Just who has domesticated whom? Perhaps it’s time for a new look at human and flower ecology and coevolution.
One new thinker is Jeannette Haviland-Jones, discussed above. Haviland-Jones and her colleagues proposed that “plant-human coevolution has been based on the emotional rewards that flowers provide, just as companion animals provide an emotional reward and reduce stress.” The idea that emotions play a role in evolution comes from one of the pioneers in the field of emotions research. The late Silvan Tomkins claimed, “Man is one of those animals whose individual survival and group reproduction rests heavily on social responsiveness and mutual enjoyment.”
Haviland-Jones and her colleagues have proposed a new explanation of plant-human coevolution, for why we like, respond to, and care for cultivated flowers. Other researchers suggest that we enjoy flowers because of innate preferences for their perfect symmetry or an inborn love of all nature. Haviland-Jones believes that humans and cultivated flowers need one another. Flowers fill a positive emotional niche. In turn, flower seeds are collected, sown, grown, and protected by us. The reproductive fitness of plants was enhanced when they encountered and began to rely upon us for their care.
We humans depend upon wild and domesticated organisms for our health and happiness (often termed ecosystem services), but we rarely consider how animals (except pets) may depend upon us. This is true not just for large animals, but for the countless beneficial microorganisms (gut symbionts) that inhabit our bodies, without whose chemical secretions and other benefits we could not survive.
Does this type of coevolution occur in nature? Recently (2000), Otto von Helversen found that certain bat flowers had floral scents containing sulfur compounds. These mimicked the sex pheromones of the bats themselves, ones used in sexual recognition during bat sex parties, during which the flowers are visited and pollinated.
Or think of highly domesticated animals, especially our pet dogs and cats. A lot has happened in the thirty thousand or so years that humans and dogs have roamed together. Wolves were camp followers and began early to read our emotions, understanding our human ways. Maybe you have read the pouplar book Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz? Quickly, on an evolutionary time scale, wolves became dogs. One of a domesticated dog’s “duties,” like that of flowers, is to ensure our happiness and reduce our stress levels. In contrast, we haven’t created wildy different honey bee breeds, but simply given them comfy wooden boxes, surrogate bee trees, to live inside, while we go about robbing their honey. We have, however, drastically modified almost all garden flowers from their wild ancestors.
Flowers, whether living in pots or flower beds, have taken on a new cultural and evolutionary role as our companion plants. Plenty of us, millions of gardeners and floral caretakers, water, feed, and care for them. We transport flowering plants around the world, tending to their needs, then harvesting their precious fruits and seeds. But, who is in charge, really? Is this coevolution a mutualistic dance, or are flowers simply exploiting us? Are we too naive to understand this truth? Perhaps it is the flowers who have led us along garden paths, using their seductive petaled beauty, since they were first intentionally grown, tended, and admired in ancient gardens. Have flowers induced new behaviors in humans and other species, leading to their increased seed production and dispersal, and hence the replication, survival and spread of “emotive” genes into subsequent generations of new plants? I think that flowers may have done some or all of these things as part of human cultural evolution.
At least 250,000 flowering-plant species are alive today. Even the bookkeeping for plants already described by botanists is debated. Some insist that plant explorers have only discovered and named half of all the extant species. That logic would put the total number of flower-bearing species today at a half million. The most floral diversity can be found in rain forests of the earth’s equatorial belts. As recently as 1950, 15 percent of the earth’s surface was clothed in verdant rain forests. Today, half of all rain forests have literally gone up in smoke, with losses of more than two hundred thousand acres every day. Every acre of these richest of all habitats may hold 750 kinds of trees and 1,500 flowering plants. Some estimates are that we are losing 137 plant and animal species each day, a staggering 50,000 annual extinctions due to tropical deforestation alone. Half of all the world’s plants and animals live in these rain forests.
Given the above figures, it should not come as a surprise that we have lost many of our flowers even before they are discovered, appreciated, or used (e.g., vincristine for childhood leukemia). At least 80 percent of the developed world’s diet originates from tropical agricultural plants. About three thousand edible fruits are found in rain forests. The Western world uses only two hundred of them, while indigenous cultures have used over two thousand. The Center for Plant Conservation at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis estimates that globally we have already lost more than 90 flowering-plant species to extinction. At the time of writing (2015), about 68.8 percent of the world’s 250,000 flowering plants are either endangered or threatened to some degree. This shockingly high figure should cause everyone to take notice.
What will plant losses be like in another twenty-five or fifty years? Will unbroken tracts of rain forests exist anywhere? In the United States, forty-two hundred species have federal or state endangerment status. Humans are the culprits. Biologist Edward O. Wilson stated that rampant anthropogenic species extinctions happening now are what future generations are most likely to remember and least likely to forgive us for. What were we thinking, and why didn’t we care? Where was our biophilia?
Flowers are only an ephemeral link in the life history of a flowering plant, but the critical first step for what follows. You need a flower to make a fruit with seeds representing the next generation. Conservationists, environmentalists, and land managers need to recognize when a link in the conservation process breaks. Botanists find out why a link is broken, and then conservation biologists apply various remedies to fix it. These conservation measures can be as simple as enacting protective laws, removing an introduced herbivore, or protecting critical remaining plant habitats, or as complex as eliminating a disease agent or reintroducing a rare plant, and its pollinators, to its former homelands.
Many examples of rare and endangered plants appear around the world. These include most of the native flowering plants in Hawaii, especially the lobelioids that are dependent upon curved-bill avian pollinators such as the crimson ‘I‘iwi that we met in an earlier chapter. Broken relationships are also to be found in the low reproductive rates in the rare lady slipper orchids (Calypso spp.). Slipper orchids are pollinated by bumble bees in American peat bogs or montane habitats such as those in the Colorado Rockies. The white flowers of bear grass (Xerophyllum tenax) are stolen by plant poachers in the Pacific Northwest; thus like some rare orchids, they are threatened by overharvesting.
The yellow Missouri bladderpod (Physaria filiformis), a threatened species, is confined to hilltop glades in the Ozarks and endangered by encroaching housing developments. Across the plains of Canada and the Midwestern US corn belt, weedy plants, milkweeds in the genus Asclepias, are being plowed under or slammed with herbicides and other “chemical chain saws” alongside irrigation ditches. To many farmers, these are only noxious weeds to be dug out or sprayed upon every encounter. Fortunately, these antiquated views are changing. For migrating monarch butterflies, and scores of bees, wasps, and other pollinators, native milkweeds are their essential food resources. For the monarchs, each clump of milkweed is a nectar refueling site, a way station on their multigenerational, two-thousand-mile migrations from the Canadian prairies, across America’s heartlands, over the Gulf of Mexico, to their eleven-thousand-foot-high winter roosts among the branches of oyamel firs in the mountains of Michoacán, Mexico. The 2014/15 winter saw the lowest number of overwintering monachs ever. Monarch migrations are on their way to becoming an endangered epiphenomenon, unless we act now.
In Missouri, Mead’s milkweed (Asclepias meadii), studied by botanists Peter Bernhardt and Retha Edens-Meier, is threatened by an introduced fungus that attacks the dainty milkweed blossoms. Fungal diseases turn the delightful flowers of campions (Silene) into spore makers instead of pollen makers. Many beautiful flowering plants have been brought to the threshold of extinction because they are no longer reproducing or are now suffering drastic declines in the number of seeds produced on the plants. You simply can’t make seeds without flowers, or without the help of pollinators in most cases. Unmanaged pollinators are often better and less expensive pollinators than human surrogates in the form of conservation biologists and their hordes of ever-willing volunteers. The rural Chinese women and children now climbing among fruit tree branches dabbing pollen on stigmas with paintbrushes is not a viable economic model nor should it ever be for any part of the world.
Some species such as the beautiful Franklin (Franklinia alatamaha), a small tree first collected in 1765 by John Bartram as seeds from specimens growing along the banks of the Altamaha River in Georgia, are now extinct in the wild. Patriotically, the genus Franklinia was named after Benjamin Franklin by a Bartram cousin in 1785. The lovely Franklinia has large, fragrant, white flowers much like Camellia flowers, but sweetly scented, reminiscent of a honeysuckle. Today, you rarely find the plants growing in cultivation, and gardeners complain that the plant is susceptible to a root-rot disease and difficult to cultivate. Franklinia lives on only in captivity behind garden gates, and frozen in liquid nitrogen canisters within US national seed banks.
Dangling from a rope, in climbing gear, a young conservationist rapels backward down a two-thousand-foot-high sea cliff along the Nā Pali Coast of Kaua’i in the Hawaiian archipelago. He moves carefully toward isolated individuals of a strange, unworldly looking plant. Like a pollinator, he delivers pollen (but purposefully), powdery grains stored in a glass vial and applied with an artist’s watercolor brush. The rare plants look like cabbages atop baseball bats. This rare Hawaiian plant is Brighamia insignis (alula), a critically endangered plant in the bellflower family. Broad, succulent leaves form a rosette atop tapering stalks three to sixteen feet tall. Brought to near extinction by the powerful hurricane Iniki (1992), browsing by feral goats, and human disturbance, it is now literally a cliff-hanger. There may be only five populations totaling forty-five to sixty-five specimens left in the wild. Alula’s fragrant, showy, yellow flowers have a strong honeysuckle-like fragrance. They bloom at night, offering nectar deep within three- to five-inch-long floral tubes.
Historically, Brighamia plants appear to have been pollinated by a native Sandwich Islands moth, the green sphinx moth (Tinostoma smaragditis), once believed to be extinct, but which now occurs only in isolated, small populations far from its host flower. Without its moth, Brighamia must be hand-pollinated to produce any seeds. Ironically, although protected under the US endangered species act, Brighamia has become an almost-commonplace European potted houseplant after becoming a darling of plant collectors. Drastic rescue efforts in Hawaii have worked for Brighamia. Specimens are not only being hand-pollinated, but seedlings raised in greenhouses are now being reintroduced into former habitats. And two introduced hawk moths (Manduca quinquemaculata and M. sexta) seem to be substituting for Brighamia’s endemic moth pollinator. Humans, however, can’t step in as surrogate pollinator superheroes for every imperiled flower around the world. We must strive to protect habitats, flowering plants, and their coevolved animal pollinator guilds by changing a few human bad habits.
Around the world thousands of wildflower species are threatened with extinction. Many are now extinct. Flowering plants should be protected for their own sake. If an economic rationalization must exist to conserve flowers, we needn’t look farther than our own home gardens. Many endangered blooms around the world are ancestors of our most beloved garden and cut flowers. If flowering plants are truly our sidekick companion plants, then we must think about caring for them and their wild relatives. The daily news or NGO annual reports need not be filled only with depressing statistics. Dedicated scientists, naturalists, students, citizen scientists, and volunteers are busily planting, transplanting, and caring for rare plants. Conservation ideas are spreading, and people are now coming to the aid of flowering plants, fellow riders on our planet, a singular but fertile pale blue dot in the vast cosmos. Some plants, once facing extinction, now have bright futures due to the actions of concerned people.
By planting native wildflowers or heirloom varieties in pollinator-friendly private and public gardens, by not using insecticides or herbicides, and by joining grassroots public campaigns and organizations such as the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign, the Pollinator Partnership, Monarch Watch, Make Way for Monarchs, the Xerces Society, and others devoted to protecting native plants along with their pollinators, all of us can make significant efforts to conserve flowers and their animal pollinators. These may be conservation baby steps, but combined across the globe, they can quickly afford lasting protection. We can become plant stewards, starting right in our homes, backyards, and parklands.
We can all help by buying organic flowers, especially those certified as green by various agencies. We can support local flower producers who raise their crops without contaminating insecticides, fungicides, and fertilizers, which ultimately pollute our groundwater and soils. Buying organic flowers helps ensure safe working conditions on flower farms, enabling living wages and other benefits, along with promoting social and environmental justice, truly caring for the workers along with their flowers.
The relationship between flowers and people has been a long and wondrous mutual journey. Flowers arose during the early Cretaceous period while dinosaurs looked on, munching their leaves, flowers, and fruits. Our distant hominid ancestors learned to recognize flowers as the harbingers of spring and their luscious fruits that followed. The tastiest and most nutritious of human and wildlife foods are fruits, berries, and seeds. Natufians living in the Middle East over ten thousand years ago laid their dead upon floral biers. We still honor and gift one another with vibrant blooms. Flowers scent the air and our bodies. Our homes and offices are decorated with their cut stems and with potted plants. We garden with flowers and they soothe our minds and bodies. They inspire us. We write about flowers and choose them as subjects in our paintings and photographs. Whether flowers or people are in control of this relationship is perhaps debatable. Nevertheless, by caring for them, we learn that flowers sustain and feed us, enriching our lives.
If flowers heal us, shouldn’t we also try to heal flowers? Can we meet the numerous environmental challenges, including desertification, deforestation, and other habitat alterations along with climate changes, ones of our own making? Will people heal nature? It’s not all gloom and doom in our wildlands, parks, and cities. I’m optimistic that this generation and future ones can coexist with nature, that species losses can be slowed and eventually stabilized. All is not lost, there is abundant hope. Flowers and people need and depend upon one another for mutual survival.