“Once upon a time there were no flowers at all.” —Loren Eiseley
Imagine that. A planet green, but without bloom. No petals, no pollen, no bursts of color to herald the seasons. Just a long, monotonous hush in the history of plant life. Until, somewhere near the end of the Age of Reptiles, as Eisley so beautifully described it, there occurred “a soundless, violent explosion.”
It wasn’t fire or fury—it was flowers.
And isn’t that what spring feels like, even now? A silent eruption. One day the earth is still, sparse, sleep-soaked. The next, snowdrops pierce the soil, daffodils tilt toward the light, and tulips begin to unfurl. Life comes roaring back—gently.
We see it here at the nursery each year. The return of our perennials feels like a reenactment of an ancient revolution. The world blooming all over again, thanks to the rise of the angiosperms, the flowering plants.
So what exactly are angiosperms? The term itself means “vessel seed”—a poetic way of saying their seeds are held in a protective container. That container, of course, is the ovary of the flower, which later ripens into a fruit. From apples and orchids to clematis and catmint, angiosperms make up over 300,000 species and dominate nearly every terrestrial landscape on Earth.
Their success is thanks in part to one evolutionary leap: the seed.
The earliest land plants, like mosses and liverworts, reproduced without seeds at all. They relied on water to carry their sperm to eggs—a strategy that limited how far they could spread, and where they could grow. Ferns came next, producing spores instead of seeds which were still limited and fragile, as they sent their genetic material into the world with no protection.
The seed changed everything. It allowed plants to protect and nourish the embryo, giving it a better shot at survival and long-distance travel. And thus flowers spread across the globe. “Little capsules of life,” Eiseley called them. Small miracles wrapped in botanical packaging.
Last week, I spotted my neighbor standing on tiptoe beside his pawpaw tree, a painter’s brush in hand. With the care of a watchmaker, he was dusting pollen from one flower onto another. “They’re primitive trees,” he explained sheepishly. He wasn’t wrong. Pawpaws are part of an older branch on the evolutionary tree. Unlike many modern angiosperms, they haven’t developed the showy strategies or scent-based invitations to draw in bees and butterflies. In the past they relied on now-extinct megafauna (like the giant sloth) to disperse their seed. In the wild, they rely on beetles, or ants, or flies, all of which were more common during the early evolution of flowering plants. They may also rely on a gust of wind. In the garden, they sometimes rely on us.
It was a quiet, almost reverent act: one human helping a flower complete the work it began over a hundred million years ago.
Over time, flowering plants began forging new relationships—co-evolving with insects who fed on their nectar and, in doing so, carried their pollen from bloom to bloom. This mutual exchange reshaped the evolutionary path of both flower and pollinator. Butterflies. Bees. Even hummingbirds. In place of wind-blown chance, angiosperms developed specificity—a kind of precision mailing system. It was as if evolution moved from scribbling a zip code to addressing a letter down to the house number: targeted, efficient, collaborative. Pollination became a reliable system of exchange, and from it blossomed the dazzling diversity we see today.
That’s why we care so deeply about promoting biodiversity here at the nursery. A garden isn’t just about the plants—it’s about the lives they support. Pollinators, birds, beetles, and even the soil microbes—they’re all part of this living web. The flowers bring the color, yes. But they also feed the world.
Take the magnolia (of which we have a few in stock) ,for example. Like the pawpaw, it’s from an ancient lineage of flowering plants. Its creamy blooms evolved before bees even existed, and to this day, magnolias are pollinated by beetles—some of the earliest flower visitors on Earth. Their thick, waxy petals are built to withstand those clumsy crawlers. It’s an important reminder that there are many ways to bloom, many timelines for beauty—and that it takes many kinds of insects, not just the usual favorites, to keep this grand floral partnership going.
Next time you’re in the garden, take a closer look at the flowers around you. Each is a masterpiece of form and function—sepals guarding the bud, petals coaxing in pollinators, stamens and pistils performing their quiet choreography. From the whimsical climb of clematis to the aromatic haze of nepeta spilling into sun-warmed beds, and the bright, steady yellow of yarrow, the flowers we carry at the nursery are part of that ongoing revolution.
If our lives weren’t so saturated with their presence, their existence might still astound us.
That’s it for me. I’ll get back to filing forms and fawning over flowering plants.
—The Bookkeeper
Further Reading
Eiseley, L. (1957). The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature.
