How Flowers Made Our World

A fascinating examination of the enormous impact that flowering plants have had on all life … An edifying celebration * Kirkus Reviews - starred review *In this dazzling book, scintillating with wonder and scholarship, Haskell shows us how flowers – so often belittled and misunderstood, have shaped ecology, and so shaped us. Flowers are tectonic, and here is a book worthy of them. – Charles Foster, author of The Edges of the WorldA tender portrait of flowering plants as powerful agents of change. Flowers wield beauty as a world-making force, actively shaping the planet—and, by extension, us. This book is a joyful exhortation to floral reverence, and brims with curiosity, humour, and crystal-clear scientific delights. We are all more in sway of flowers than we think. Richly precise, How Flowers Made Our World is a celebration of the inventiveness of floral life. – Zoë Schlanger, author of The Light Eaters, staff writer, The AtlanticDavid George Haskell’s great strength as a writer is that he is open to surprise. He regards the planet as a strange and beautiful place. How Flowers Made Our World is at once closely observed, richly reported, and mind-blowing. – Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction‘Who runs the world? Girls!’ sang Beyoncé a while back, but really it’s flowers and flowering plants that run this world and have for more than a hundred million years. In this vividly written book, David George Haskell shows how they do that, how flowering plants made the modern world from prairies and rainforests to bees and butterflies, how the most trivialized part of the natural world is among its most powerful and essential. – Rebecca Solnit, writer, historian, and activist, author of Orwell’s Roses

David Haskell is a writer and biologist, adjunct professor of environmental sciences at Emory University and a Guggenheim Fellow. Known for his integration of science, lyrical writing and close observation of the living world, he has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, for The Forest Unseen and Sounds Wild and Broken. In 2024, the American Academy of Arts and Letters granted him an Award in Literature.