Transcript

Anne Strainchamps: Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. I'm Anne Strainchamps.
Steve Paulson: And I'm Steve Paulson.
Anne Strainchamps: Every year, at about this time, something truly miraculous happens. The spring equinox arrives.
Steve Paulson: The sun crosses into the northern hemisphere. Daylight outlasts darkness.
Anne Strainchamps: And the planet flowers. Superblooms carpet the California desert. Magnolias perfume the south.
Steve Paulson: And here in the north, snowdrops and the first tips of daffodils poke through the soil.
Anne Strainchamps: These flowers — and all the rest that will follow — are ephemeral. They look so fragile. But they're among the most powerful forces on earth.
Steve Paulson: With a story and an evolutionary strategy that we need now more than ever.

David Haskell: One of the practices is just to sit with a flower. It could be five minutes, it could be an hour. You can repeat this over and over again with the same flower, watch it through its entire life cycle, and open our imagination to all the things that are happening with that flower. What is the intention of this flower? Where did this flower first evolve? And then the flower itself is releasing aromas. It has an electrical field that has a particular shape around it that is attracting certain insects and repelling other ones. So sitting with a flower, we can pay attention to the things that we can sense and delight in, but we can also let our imaginations roam into the unseen wonders of the bloom.

Anne Strainchamps: This is the biologist and celebrated nature writer David Haskell, and he's just written a remarkable book called How Flowers Made Our World. It turns the story of evolution on its head by putting flowers at the forefront of life on earth. What Roger Payne did for whales and Carl Sagan did for the cosmos, David Haskell is doing for flowers.
Steve Paulson: You told me that I would never look at a flower the same way again after listening to this conversation.
Anne Strainchamps: Was I right?
Steve Paulson: I think you were, yeah. So before we dive in — who is David Haskell?
Anne Strainchamps: He is a biologist and writer, and he's famous for the way he brings contemplative practice into natural observation. His first book was The Forest Unseen – it's the one where he watched one square meter of old-growth Tennessee forest for a year and turned it into a window into the whole hidden world of forest ecology.
Steve Paulson: It was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. I remember that the great biologist E.O. Wilson called it “a new genre of nature writing located between science and poetry.”
Anne Strainchamps: Yeah, David Haskell is a gorgeous, lyrical writer — I think partly because he's so sensitive to sound, to the musicality of language. He's written about sonic landscapes, about the evolution of natural sound on earth: birdsongs, animal calls, ocean waves. He has an amazing gift for bringing people back into an embodied, sensory experience of nature.
Steve Paulson: Which we witnessed in person. Because I remember this gathering —
Anne Strainchamps: I wondered if you'd remember that.
Steve Paulson: That we were at a few years ago in northern Illinois, where he took everyone on a barefoot walk through a prairie oak savanna, and had us listening and touching and smelling trees, which turned into this — as I remember — this beautiful guided meditation.
Wasn't it like an evolutionary history, going right up to the soil that we were standing on?
Anne Strainchamps: Yes. However, it was also freezing. It was sunset, in October. I was shivering and you very gallantly shared your coat with me. So I might have missed a little of the profundity.
Steve Paulson: So I guess it's a good thing that you had this conversation indoors. Let's listen.

Anne Strainchamps: Part of the fun of reading this book is this very bold, kind of sexy claim, I think, that flowers made the world. They show up in the Cretaceous era, seize the reins of evolution, remake the biosphere, and have been running things ever since — which is exactly the opposite of the way we usually see flowers, as decorative and not much more.
David Haskell: Yes, in our culture, we dismiss flowers as pretty. We honor them — we spend a lot of money on flower gardening and cut flowers and so forth — but we think of flowers as, well, just ornaments, really. And there's a gendered aspect to this, because flowers are also in our culture now pegged as pretty much exclusively feminine. Therefore, the patriarchal logic goes, weak and not in charge and ornamental
Anne Strainchamps: And also sexualized.
David Haskell: Which is absurd at many levels. At one level, we've picked the most biologically bisexual thing there is in nature, which is a flower — most flowers have both male and female sex cells within them. But also, beyond the aspects of gender, we forget that we live on a floral planet. Almost every bite of food that we humans consume has one way or another been either produced directly by flowering plants, or by creatures that have eaten those flowering plants.
We're a flower-eating species. Our human evolution was catalyzed by flowering plants. Primates came up into the trees and started eating fruits and flowers, so without flowering plants, there would have been no primates. And then our arboreal cousins came out onto the African savannah and became our ancestors by walking in the grasslands — and what is a grass? A specialized kind of flowering plant.
David Haskell: And then at a global level, ignoring humans for a moment, think about the most productive ecosystems on the planet today: mangroves, seagrass meadows, rainforests. None of these places existed before the evolution of flowering plants. Rainforests in particular did not exist before flowering plants, because one of the innovations of flowering plants was to refashion their water-conducting elements within their bodies so they could push enormous amounts of water vapor into the air and photosynthesize at incredible rates. And when that happened, they changed the weather. They literally — and this is from the title of a scientific paper — they put the rain in the rainforest.
Anne Strainchamps: Wow.
David Haskell: And so, indeed, we live on a floral planet. If you were to take away the flowers from the grand narrative of Earth evolution, we'd still be on a marvelous planet — there'd be amazing ferns, all kinds of cool mosses and cycads and pines. But take away flowering plants, and we take away much of Earth's diversity, and we certainly take away humans. Which is not how we normally think of human evolution. We don't think, "Oh, well, we thank the flowers for our creation." But that's what we should be doing.
Anne Strainchamps: Yeah, so here's the thing. When I started reading your book, I had a visceral reaction, partly because of that historical association of women with flowers. If flowers are such prime movers, so essential for needs as basic as food, why don't we see them this way? How and why did flowers — like women — get dismissed and denigrated?
David Haskell: Well, the two, of course, are tied up together, and it's taken different forms in different cultures. For British and French kings, flowers were symbols of divine right to rule — with roses and irises and so on used as symbols of power.
Anne Strainchamps: Right, the Tudor roses and the French lilies.
David Haskell: And in the Middle East, rose perfume was regarded for centuries, if not for millennia, as actually quite a masculine scent. So it hasn't always been the case that we've lived embedded in the present cultural prejudice around flowers.
David Haskell: But there are ancient roots to our general dismissal of flowers, and more broadly of plants. If you look at Paleolithic cave paintings in Europe, there are almost no plants and no flowers represented whatsoever — it's ninety-nine percent animals. The things that first catch our attention are the other creatures that are communicating the way we do. There's a reason why birds are present in almost all scriptures and creation stories: they sing and speak, they have flashy colors, and they're at the same spatial scale as we are. So we relate to the birds. We relate to fast-moving animals. In the plant world, we often relate mostly to the trees and the things that really catch our attention.
David Haskell: But also there's a story, I think, and a prejudice about power. We — and this is one thing that I think is really important for our present time, an important message from the flowers — we often think of power and revolution as about control, authoritarianism, and violence.
Anne Strainchamps: Might makes right.
David Haskell: But that's not the only way in which revolution and power and transformation take place. Flowers offer a different narrative. They changed the world in revolutionary ways through cooperation, through collaboration, often mediated by beauty and sensory experience.
So a flower is quite literally speaking to the sensory system of a bee or of a hoverfly or of a bird, to draw that animal in and establish a cooperative, reciprocal relationship. And we're just the latest animal to become enchanted by the flowers and to become loyal collaborators with them. We see this in our gardens and horticulture and agriculture.
Anne Strainchamps: The thing that you're pointing out that feels so amazing to me is: it's not just that flowers give us a story of evolution. It's a story of relationship and cooperative networks. It's a story in which beauty and delight, joy, enchantment are not frivolous — they're not even optional. They are essential to the entire biosphere, essential to the way nature works. I can feel my heart open, thinking about that.
David Haskell: And that's one thing that happened to me as I was writing this book. As I went through these chapters, gathering information and experiences and thinking about this, I kept realizing how again and again, the catalytic effect of flowering plants is mediated by beauty. And that's something that our culture right now needs more of. We need more beauty and joy.
And I think — consider human ethics. Often we think about ethics as an intellectual exercise: what sort of action is right action or wrong action? Let's figure this out in the seminar room. And often the experiences of beauty have no place in that conversation. Flowers — and I would argue other creatures as well — teach us a different story. By opening to the importance and the fundamental significance of beauty, we actually get a guide to where we might root ourselves to find the path to right action.
David Haskell: So, for example, someone who's lived in a particular neighborhood for decades and really paid attention to it — both the human community and the more-than-human community — when something happens in that neighborhood, that person will have a deep sense of whether this change is really beautiful, or whether it's profoundly broken and ugly. And often the superficial beautification is actually creating ugliness elsewhere. For example, spraying things with pesticides to get rid of so-called weeds produces a uniform green lawn, which is beautiful in a certain way, but it's not deeply beautiful. So deep experiences of beauty, built over time and really seeing the whole network of relationships — I think that's the place to ground morality.
David Haskell: And there are few things more motivating than a profound sense of beauty. That leads to the other word, which is joy: this unasked-for, unearned sense of connection and elevation of life that far transcends the self.
Anne Strainchamps: I want to ground us a little bit more. You wrote this gorgeous chapter about magnolias, which grow all over your area — Atlanta. Here in the upper Midwest, we have tulip trees. Are those the same thing?
David Haskell: They are related to one another. They're close cousins.
Anne Strainchamps: So in my neighborhood, I have a neighbor who has a huge, mature tulip tree — it's taller than her house. And every spring, when it bursts into bloom, she sends a party invitation to the whole neighborhood, and people gather underneath that tree. This is usually the first time people have come together outdoors after a long winter. People bring food, the kids show up, people talk about what they did last winter, they notice how the kids have grown. It's become a neighborhood seasonal rite. And I love thinking that the tree itself, in bloom, is the party. Anyway, I knew you'd love it — but tell me about your magnolias.
David Haskell: Well, first, I absolutely adore that story, because I think one thing we need more than almost anything else in our culture is renewal of rituals of celebration around other species. So the first blooming of the tulip trees, or the return of the chimney swifts, the first spring peepers — I have practices of this for myself, and I've invited students and neighbors and friends into them. For me, they are extraordinarily important.
Anne Strainchamps: What's one of yours?
David Haskell: Well, lying down on my cracked driveway here in Atlanta with my hand lens, and looking close at the bittercress weeds that are growing up through the cracks — they have these absolutely gorgeous ivory-cream flowers. They're tiny little flowers, and they come up when everything else is still quite muted. And it feels like this eruption of possibility and of hope from the ground, in the most improbable place, which is busted-up concrete in a driveway in an urban area in the middle of a big city. For me, those are often the most beautiful experiences: the vitality of life in unexpected places.
David Haskell: Because that's what's coming. In a few million years, humans will have gone extinct or will have evolved into something else. Bittercress will have taken over the continent. Magnolia trees will be coming out of the edges of the cities. So, yes — gathering communally to celebrate creatures like the tulip trees is really, really important.
David Haskell: The significance of the tulip tree and the magnolia is that these are descendants — almost unchanged — of some of the very first flowering plants to appear on the planet. If you look at the structure of a tulip tree flower or of a magnolia flower, it's essentially a relatively simple bowl of petals with both male and female parts inside. And the magnolias in particular produce this absolutely gorgeous aroma that drifts like ribbons of scent through the city. Even in the more diesel-fume-choked parts of Atlanta, you get little whiffs of magnolia blooms in May.
David Haskell: And they're almost tropical — think of those big, waxy, cup-shaped flowers with this intoxicating scent inside, flowers the size of dinner plates. So this is not a subtle form of beauty, which is part of the point of flowers: they want to do what it takes to draw in creatures. And the creatures that are most attracted to magnolia flowers are the ones that were the first pollinators of the first flowers — tiny little beetles and flies. Particularly the beetles seem absolutely intoxicated by this scent.
Anne Strainchamps: How do the flowers make their scent — what part of them? I don't even know how to describe the smell of the magnolia. I just know it feels heavy and rich.
David Haskell: Yes, and it's transporting. There's a little narrative arc within the aroma. It's sort of a little bit bitter and cucumbery when the magnolia flower first opens, with layers of clove and a little bit of citrus coming through. And then when it's fully open, the bitterness goes away and you're just in this warm, enveloping world that feels like soaking in a warm bath — this whole-body sensation that lasts for a few seconds and then it's gone, and you're back to being a normal old human standing on the sidewalk.
Anne Strainchamps: So it's kind of like being high.
David Haskell: Well, it is being high. What is being high? When you smoke a joint, you're taking botanical chemicals into your body and they're uniting temporarily with nerve receptors. When you smell a flower, those aromatic molecules are going directly into your nose, but also into your bloodstream and binding with the cells of the human body and producing a particular neurological effect. It might be very temporary — a little burst of pleasure. Medicinalists and herbalists have known this for a long time: the aromas of flowers, and also the aromas of tree resins and other things, can be very healing. Not as a placebo effect, but because those molecules go into our body and actually heal us.
David Haskell: The aromas of basswood trees and linden trees, for example, have been shown to be very calming to human anxiety. You can get that through smelling, and also through drinking a tea made from the flowers of the linden tree.
Anne Strainchamps: I just feel like we need to pause for a second. When I smell an especially potent rose, or some of the peonies I love best with this peppery, sweet smell, it never occurs to me that that smell is going inside me — that its molecules are moving into my brain, affecting me neurologically.
David Haskell: Smell is the most impudent of the senses. It doesn't have the decency to act at a distance the way sound and light do. Quite literally, part of the flower's body enters our body and merges with us. We become chimeric. And you'd asked about where the scent comes from in the flower — it depends a little bit on the flower, but for many, the petal itself is a living aroma diffuser. The cells on the top surface of the petal are producing aromatic oils and letting them go into the air across the cell membrane. If you look at a rose petal under a microscope, it's completely carpeted with conical cells that are stuffed full of aroma — and of course, when the sun hits that, it's a warmed aroma diffuser.
David Haskell: Those oils then bind inside our nerve receptors, or if we're using them as a perfume and rubbing ourselves in rose petals, they actually get onto the skin. And on the skin, they have antibacterial properties. These aromas are not just produced to attract insects or other animals — they also protect the petals. They have antimicrobial, antifungal functions. So we get that too: when you put that aroma on your skin, it actually kills some of the bacteria there.
Anne Strainchamps: Let's pause there and just savor that image of rubbing rose petals all over your skin, soaking in all that beauty and healing. I'm talking with David Haskell about his new book, How Flowers Made Our World. And we'll be right back.

Steve Paulson: Hey, it's Steve. I want to invite you to visit our Wonder Cabinet website, where you will find more information about the show and Anne and me. And I really hope you'll subscribe to our newsletter — we'll tell you the story behind the name of this podcast and some of the amazing guests we'll be talking with in future episodes. You can find us at wondercabinetproductions.com. And please, tell your friends about Wonder Cabinet. This is a brand new podcast, and we'd love your help in getting the word out. Thank you.

Anne Strainchamps: This is Wonder Cabinet. I'm Anne Strainchamps, and I left you swimming in rose petals — so let's see where David takes us next.

Anne Strainchamps: You went to a place I've always wanted to go: in Provence, to Grasse, where they've been making perfume for centuries. And you went to the famous international perfume museum garden. I imagine that is a totally intoxicating experience.
David Haskell: It is. It's extraordinary. Grasse these days is still a hub for perfume manufacturing and marketing, and because of the microclimate there, they could grow aromatic flowers and other plants from all over the world. There are museums there, but the one that was most fascinating to me is the living museum — the gardens — where various aromatic plants are grown alongside plants that are native to the region. So it's a very ecologically rich place, full of bees and birds, and it just feels like an aromatic garden of Eden.
Anne Strainchamps: You said that walking among the roses in the Grasse garden, you sniffed four hundred different volatiles. I had no idea that flowers could produce that many different aroma molecules.
David Haskell: Yeah, they put the human alphabet to shame. This is the language of plants — I sort of mean the analogy intentionally. Each one of those four hundred different molecules that unite into what we label as the aroma of a rose, those molecules all have particular functions within the cell, and they have communicative functions to different species of insects. And some flowers are very specific: some orchids, for example, make a blend of perfume that only one species of wasp in the entire world will be attracted to, because essentially that perfume is mimicking the sexual perfumes that the wasps use in their own mating displays. So that orchid is literally speaking to just one species of insect.
David Haskell: Whereas others — like the magnolias and to a certain extent the roses — have very wide-open, welcoming flowers that are attracting a whole range of different insects. Part of it, though, honestly, is still mysterious. We don't know, like, why can't they just get away with two hundred molecules instead of four hundred? That kind of question still doesn't have an answer — in the same way that if you ask why this bird has a song that goes up at the end and another bird has a song that goes down with a little trill, most of the particularity of the forms of birdsong is a complete mystery.
Anne Strainchamps: And don't you think something doesn't feel quite right about trying to reduce it all to utility? Maybe flowers evolved all those different scents, and birds learned to sing all those different songs, partly because it's beautiful. Everything doesn't have to have a use value.
David Haskell: No, I agree with that. But I also think that beauty can be its own use value. So, for example, a complex birdsong — the very complexity of the song is, to other birds, attractive. Just like we are attracted to people who are really cool: the cool DJ or jazz musician who can do pretty much anything on their piano or with their turntable — that's kind of cool and sexy. And so beauty itself is part of the signal. Complexity and nuance are part of that signal. So I think the line between beauty and utility in biology gets blurred, and I don't think the fact that something is utilitarian diminishes its beauty, its complexity, or indeed its scientific mystery.
Anne Strainchamps: Also, going back to your experience in Grasse — you wrote about one little section of the garden: the garden of forgotten perfume plants. Which made me think: are there aromas that we have forgotten, or aromas that we don't value or appreciate anymore?
David Haskell: Yeah, that's an interesting question. The ones in the garden, because they've been planted there, someone has remembered them. But more generally, we have — for example in the horticulture trade — mostly forgotten that one of the delights of flowers is their aromas. Most roses that you would go to the grocery store or the florist to buy have had the scent bred out of them. The same is true for many violets that were actually bred and cultivated and brought into people's homes specifically for their scent.
David Haskell: And so we have, as we have for so many other aspects of our lives, turned what was a multidimensional sensory experience into something that is just feeding the eyes. This bouquet looks good, but there's no more aroma there — which to me is a great loss of sensory experience, of richness, of potential joy.
Anne Strainchamps: I was asking that because one of the recurrent thoughts I had in reading your book is that we really need a richer language for scent, or just need to pay more attention to it. And I was thinking about your earlier work on sound and soundscapes. As an audio producer, that concept of the soundscape speaks really powerfully to me. And I began to wonder what would change if we started thinking about landscapes as scentscapes. Do certain plant aromas go together? And then what might that reveal about certain landscapes?
David Haskell: Yes — think like a bee. Because bees do have a geography, if you like, a map of scent. And indeed, that is part of my way of experiencing the world: to listen to the shapes of sounds, the different kinds of aromas that we find. For example, in the neighborhood where I live now, part of it was built in the 1940s and another part was built by basically razing forest in the 1990s. And you can smell the difference as you walk from one neighborhood to the other — there are old oak trees in one neighborhood and just small, mostly ornamental trees that have a completely different aroma in the other. Most of us have these experiences; we just don't bring them into consciousness that much.
Anne Strainchamps: I was wondering if we paid more attention to aroma, if that could actually lead in any way to better or different science, or new ecological strategies. The one book of yours that I haven't read is Thirteen Ways to Smell a Tree. I'm guessing that in that book you probably connect smelling trees to ways of fighting deforestation or coming up with better ecological interventions.
David Haskell: Yeah — or re-embodying ourselves and integrating the human intellect with the human senses, which I think is a big task before us. Re-embodying ourselves, coming back to our senses, is important for science, but it's important much more broadly — it's a foundation for figuring out right action, for finding joy. And as we were talking about earlier, beauty in our lives, making ourselves whole again.
David Haskell: We have these senses that come — to use a technological analogy — pre-installed in our body. We don't need to download them, and they're not harvesting our data. Why don't we turn them on just by turning our attention to them? A scent gives us the chance to actually really enjoy and be present for our cup of tea. And if we share the experience, as your neighbor does, with other people, we draw people together into community. And that's one of the great powers of flowering plants — they create opportunity and connection and community for others.
Anne Strainchamps: You know, we're living with this drumbeat of advice today about the importance of relationships for mental and even physical health and longevity. Over and over I keep reading articles about the importance of human relationships — make sure you have a good network. But it's always about human relationships. What about our more-than-human relationships? What about having relationships with the trees around us, or a particular backyard, or — as you described — the bittercress coming up in the middle of a sidewalk? Those relationships matter, too. And I think what all of these things really are about is getting back into our bodies, to that embodied intelligence and wisdom which knows things that we can't know just using words.
David Haskell: No, I absolutely agree. And I do think — flowers were revolutionaries not because they focused on themselves, but because they formed these interspecies communicative networks. The flowers are speaking to the insects, they're speaking to the birds and the fungi below the ground. I agree that we can expand the bounds of what friendship and kinship mean: by befriending the birds, by befriending the flowers, by cultivating flowers in our own lives. Personally, those relationships have been really important — essential — for my own health.
David Haskell: And when I read the advice that you've got to have a big friend network, I think, oh my goodness, I am failing at that one — I have a number of good friends, but could use more. And then I think, well, hang on a minute. There are dozens of birds outside my backyard that I have a pretty deep relationship with. I watch them raise their young. And these flowers that I'm cultivating in my backyard, and the vegetables in the community garden — these are beings with whom I have a very deep and intimate bodily relationship. When I look at the textures of my own mental health, the more I get that, the better I feel.
Anne Strainchamps: Yeah. I'll tell you when I began thinking that way. We spend summers in Vermont — my husband Steve's parents built a house there years ago, just a little summer house, and we've been going. And when we came back to Madison this fall, after about a week, there was a day where I thought, I miss something, but I can't tell what it is. And then I realized: I miss the Vermont trees. Actually, I miss a specific tree. And I kind of felt like — I think it misses me too.
Anne Strainchamps: And at first I thought, "Oh, Anne, don't be so fanciful." And then I thought, no — that's what a relationship is. Why wouldn't they miss me if I miss them? And that opened the door to thinking of this as a real relationship, not just me appreciating them from the outside.
David Haskell: I love the way you describe that. And for me, the thought that comes is the opening of the imagination to what friendship, relationship, and missing someone — or being bonded to another being — could be. Because of course, whatever form of sentience or intelligence and memory the trees have, it's going to be of a very different texture than our own, because their bodies are arranged in a completely different way. They're not little humanoids, and yet they're living, complex beings that are in deep relationship, in a very decentralized way, with all the creatures around them.
David Haskell: And we do become known by the places. At a microbiological level, any place that we've been, we've left our microbiological signature — we've probably also left some microplastics from our waterproof jacket – and we've left those networks of relationship. The first book I wrote was about sitting and watching one square meter of forest for a year. And at first I thought, well, I'm just an observer here. But then I came to realize: no. These chipmunks, these birds had come to know that here's this weird guy in a brown jacket who comes and sits on a particular rock every day. They basically just ignored me — they had their eye on me in a way that I could slip into the forest network without causing alarm, after repeated rounds of visiting. So I became part of that community.
David Haskell: And in fact, people have done scientific experiments to show that birds and mammals do indeed remember particular individual humans and respond to them based on our past behaviors, good or bad. So at the level of animal awareness — non-human animal awareness — we become known by the landscape. And I think that's probably true for other beings in ways that are, honestly, to me, very mysterious. I have no idea how a tree experiences the world, and I'm happy not to know, because I don't think that's a knowable thing for a human being — but we can cast our imagination into that space.
Anne Strainchamps: I think it changes everything, because caring is a two-way thing — it keeps building. The kind of caring that feels alive is when you love your child and you know your child loves you back. That's when we enter into something that feels dynamic and warm.
David Haskell: A reciprocity of regard. And it's not just about particular individual places — in general, this earth is taking care of us. It's providing the food, the oxygen, at a very material, physical level. And for me, the challenge is also that there is great brokenness. There are parents who don't love their children — and there are children who absolutely loathe their parents — that's part of those relationships as well. There are parasitic organisms that get into my body and will literally try to kill me, because that's their best strategy for getting on to the next place. So we live in ecological relationships that are extraordinarily supportive, completely life-giving, filled with beauty — and at the same time utterly weighted with pain, with brokenness, with exploitation. And those two things are simultaneously true.
David Haskell: This land was stolen. This land is also caring for me. There are fractures. There's blood soaked into the land. There's triumph and beauty and love everywhere. How do we have practices that can hold both at the same time — without getting crushed by the brokenness of things, or completely intoxicated by the beauty so that we don't see the fractures and don't see the pain that other people are suffering? And that's the bit I don't have an answer to, other than showing up. For me, it's through contemplative practice — just being, trying to be awake to the sights and the smells and the stories, the beauty and the brokenness of any particular place, of any particular relationship.
Anne Strainchamps: That's so well said and so well taken — because we really haven't talked about the ugly side of humanity's relationship with flowering plants. But of course, the drive to profit from them led to colonization and slavery and plantations, and then later industrial farming and the development of agrochemical poisons. And it matters to also hold that brokenness, as you said.
David Haskell: Yes. And particularly around flowers, I think there are things that we can do. One of the things that really shocked me in researching this book was the extent to which many flowers that we might find for sale at the garden center are absolutely soaked with poisons — really horrible for human health, but also for the health of pollinators. The very creatures that made the flowers in the first place, we're poisoning them. Even plants labeled wildlife-friendly, because there's no good standard for labeling — we're talking about dozens of poisons in one particular plant that we might buy.
David Haskell: The same thing with cut flowers at the florist shop — often laden with poisons that mostly are affecting the people who have to grow those flowers. But as individuals, we have some agency there. We can decide what we're going to grow in our garden, what kind of things we're going to buy, what things we're going to advocate for in the policy arena — so that flowers can once again become unambiguously good. By changing our aesthetics and priorities, we could actually change our relationship to flowering plants, which I think would be an extraordinary gift to give ourselves, and also to the future.

Anne Strainchamps: That's the celebrated biologist and writer David George Haskell — author of Sounds Wild and Broken and The Songs of Trees. And I highly recommend his brand new book, How Flowers Made Our World. It is an exhilarating read.
Steve Paulson: And perfect for springtime too. Hopefully you can find some flowering plants to appreciate this week, and maybe follow David's example of just sitting with one for a while.
Anne Strainchamps: Actually, Steve, I was thinking about that, and it reminded me of another exercise. Do you remember when we were at the Island of Knowledge in Italy — probably a year ago — and there was another contemplative biologist there, Andreas Weber, and he led a meditation with plants?
Steve Paulson: Oh yeah, I remember — I ended up sitting under an olive tree.
Anne Strainchamps: So I was trying to remember what he said. It was springtime in Tuscany. I was under this almond tree in bloom, covered in delicate pink flowers. The grass was full of tiny daisies. And the instructions were to find a plant you like and go sit with it for, I don't know, ten or fifteen minutes.
Steve Paulson: Do you remember what we were supposed to do then?
Anne Strainchamps: I think we were supposed to say hello. And then just observe. Oh, and we were supposed to ask a very simple question: Where do you end and I begin? You're asking the plant. And when your mind wanders, just come gently back to that question. I don't know what your experience was like, but for me — it was magical.
Steve Paulson: It was pretty great for me. But what made it so memorable for you?
Anne Strainchamps: I felt like the boundaries that separate me from the rest of the world kind of softened and dissolved. My ego, my sense of self receded. And for just this little bit of time, I was just blue sky and a living branch of pink almond blossoms. It was such a relief not to be me anymore, even just for a few minutes.
Steve Paulson: Yeah. Well, that seems like a great way to end this episode. And if you want to try it, tell us about it — you can write to us and describe what your experience was like. Reach us at wondercabinetproductions.com, and while you're there, sign up for the newsletter.
Anne Strainchamps: Wonder Cabinet comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin, and Vershire, Vermont — our two homes. Our audio engineer is Steve Gotcher.
Steve Paulson: Our digital guru is Mark Riechers.
Anne Strainchamps: Be well, and join us again next time.