A few days ago, when I ran across an article, In Bloom, by Chris Suellentrop on Slate (Feb 25, 2009) with the tag line, “Flower is the only video game I’ve played that made me feel relaxed, peaceful, and happy,” I thought, wow!, this could be good — a video game about biology, or maybe gardening. What a nice change from violence and fantasy! Reading on, however, I found:
What’s remarkable about Flower is the sensation it creates, from start to finish: simple, almost indescribable, joy.
… Kellee Santiago, the president and co-founder of thatgamecompany, the game’s publisher, says in an accompanying behind-the-scenes video that Flower is “the video game version of a poem” and that its purpose is to create “an emotion” in those who play it.
… Flower is set in an asphalt city, inside a room where all that can be heard is the rush of the traffic outside. In this grim landscape, the blur of car lights on the road seems to be the only man-made creation that doesn’t come from a palette of grays. Sitting on a table in the room is a splash of color: a yellow flower. The instructions are simple: “[T]ilt the controller to soar; press any button to blow wind; relax, enjoy.” So you do.
… After a few hours of play, the petals have painted a new city, with pink trees and white buildings and brightly colored graffiti, awnings, and birds. There’s a floating, trippy quality that’s entrancing.
WTF does any of that have to do with flowers? This is such a fat target for a major attack of sarcasm, that I’ll just leave it for you to imagine. Really, though, do people fall for this? Do people think of flowers this way? As color entirely disassociated from function?
Here, to cleanse your mind (and mine) of such rubbish, are extracts from the story, How Flowers Changed the World, by Loren Eiseley (from The Immense Journey (1957)):
A little while ago — about one hundred million years, as the geologist estimates time in the history of your four-billion-year-old planet — flowers were not to be found anywhere on the five continents. Wherever one might have looked, from the poles to the equator, one would have seen only the cold dark monotonous green of a world whose plant life possessed no other color.
Somewhere, just a short time before the close of the Age of Reptiles, there occurred a soundless, violent explosion. It lasted millions of years, but it was an explosion, nevertheless. It marked the emergence of angiosperms — the flowering plants.
… Flowers changed the face of the planet. Without them, the world we know — even man himself — would never have existed.
… The event occurred in Cretaceous times in the close of the Age of Reptiles. Before the coming of the flowering plants our own ancestral stock, the warm-blooded mammals, consisted of a few mousy little creatures hidden in trees and underbrush. A few lizard-like birds with carnivorous teeth flapped awkwardly on ill-aimed flights among archaic shrubbery. None of these insignificant creatures gave evidence of any remarkable talents. The mammals in particular had been around for some millions of years, but had remained well lost in the shadow of the mighty reptiles. Truth to tell, man was still, like the genie in the bottle, encased in the body of a creature about the size of a rat.
… When the first simple flower bloomed on some raw upland late in the Dinosaur Age, it was wind pollinated, just like its early pine-cone relatives. It was a very inconspicuous flower because it had not yet evolved the idea of using the surer attraction of birds and insects to achieve the transportation of pollen. It sowed its own pollen and received the pollen of other flowers by the simple vagaries of the wind.
… The primitive spore, a single cell fertilized in the beginning by a swimming sperm, did not promote rapid distribution, and the young plant moreover, had to struggle up from nothing. No one had left it any food except what it could get by its own unaided efforts.
By contrast, the true flowering plants (angiosperm itself means “encased seed”) grew a seed in the heart of a flower, a seed whose development was initiated by a fertilizing pollen grain independent of outside moisture. But the seed, unlike the developing spore, is already a fully equipped embryonic plant packed in a little enclosed box stuffed full of nutritious food. Moreover, by featherdown attachments, as in dandelion or milkweed seed, it can be wafted upward on gusts and ride the wind for miles; or with hooks it can cling to a bear’s or a rabbit’s hide; or like some of the berries, it can be covered with a juicy, attractive fruit to lure birds, pass undigested through their intestinal tracts and be voided miles away.
… The old, stiff, sky-reaching wooden world had changed into something that glowed here and there with strange colors, put out queer, unheard-of fruits and little intricately carved seed cases, and, most important of all, produced concentrated foods in a way that the land had never seen before, or dreamed of back in the fish-eating, leaf-crunching days of the dinosaurs.
That food came from three sources, all produced by the reproductive system of the flowering plants. There were the tantalizing nectars and pollens intended to draw insects for pollenizing purposes … There were the juicy and enticing fruits to attract animals, and in which tough-coated seeds were concealed …Then, as if this were not enough, there was the food in the actual seed itself, the food intended to nourish the embryo. All over the world, like hot corn in a popper, these incredible elaborations of the flowering plants kept exploding. Ini a movement that was almost instantaneous, geologically speaking, the angiosperms had taken over the world. Grass was beginning to cover the bare earth until, today, there are over six thousand species.
… Apes were to become men, in the inscrutable wisdom of nature, because flowers had produced seeds and fruits in such tremendous quantities that a new and totally different store of energy had become available in concentrated form. … Down on the grass by a streamside, one of those apes with inquisitive fingers turned over a stone and hefted it vaguely. The group clucked together in a throaty tongue and moved off through the tall grass foraging for seeds and insects. The one still held, sniffed, and hefted the stone he had found. He liked the feel of it in his fingers. The attack on the animal world was about to begin.
If one could run the story of that first human group like a speeded-up motion picture through a million years of time, one might see the stone in the hand change to the flint ax and the torch. All that swarming grassland world with its giant bison and trumpeting mammoths would go down in ruin to feed the insatiable and growing numbers of a carnivore who, like the great cats before him, was taking his energy indirectly from the grass. Later he found fire and it altered the tough meats and drained their energy even faster into a stomach ill adapted for the ferocious turn man’s habits had taken.
His limbs grew longer, he strode more purposefully over the grass. The stolen energy that would take man across the continents would fail him at last. The great Ice Age herds were destined to vanish. When they did so, another hand like the hand that grasped the stone by the river long ago would pluck a handful of grass seed and hold it contemplatively.
In that moment, the golden towers of man, his swarming millions, his turning wheels, the vast learning of his packed libraries,would glimmer dimly there in the ancestor of wheat, a few seed held in a muddy hand. Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at all, would be today unrecognizable. Archaeopteryx, the lizard-bird, might still be snapping at beetles on a sequoia limb; man might still be a nocturnal insectivore, gnawing a roach in the dark. The weight of a petal has changed the face of the world and made it ours.
If you’d like to read the whole story, unchopped, go here.
From Wikipedia:
The function of the flower is to ensure fertilization of the ovule and development of fruit containing seeds.
And:
Agriculture is almost entirely dependent on angiosperms, either directly or indirectly through livestock feed. Of all the families plants, the Poaceae, or grass family, is by far the most important, providing the bulk of all feedstocks (rice, corn (maize), wheat, barley, rye, oats, pearl millet, sugar cane, sorghum). The Fabaceae, or legume family, comes in second place. Also of high importance are the Solanaceae, or nightshade family (potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers, among others), the Cucurbitaceae, or gourd family (also including pumpkins and melons), the Brassicaceae, or mustard plant family (including rapeseed and cabbage), and the Apiaceae, or parsley family. Many of our fruits come from the Rutaceae, or rue family, and the Rosaceae, or rose family (including apples, pears, cherries, apricots, plums, etc).
Flowers are not a video game. They’re not made by your local florist just to decorate your home. Really.
-Julie
Coloring 