From flowers has blossomed the beginning of humankind. In this poetic essay Priyanka Singh Parihar shares meditations on flowers and how their origins are tied to the origins of humankind.
With the emergence of flowers, the relationship between plants and insects shifted in many cases toward mutualism. From flowers came fruits, and from feeding on fruits, early mammals developed traits that later contributed to the evolution of primates. David George Haskell, in his book How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries, presents flowers as revolutionaries and habitat builders. What message does the flower hold in a world that desperately needs a revolution?
In the deep darkness of the Raqefet Cave, around 13000 years ago, humans carried violet-coloured flowered salvia, mint and sage and laid them on the floor. On this bed of flowers, they put their dead to their final sleep. A departure to the otherworld, scented with native blossoms. Perhaps an offering to guide the spirit on the other side to soothe the pain of separation in both worlds. In the burial site of Natufian graves lies the first evidence of humans bringing flower offerings to their deceased.
Why such affinity towards fragile flowers? What makes them so precious that when words fall short, flowers convey our deepest emotions? Even though flowers are ephemeral, they symbolise eternity, seasons, and cycles of return. Flowers for the dead, perhaps, are a promise of such a return. As in the words of Edvard Munch, “From my rotting body, flowers shall grow, and I am in them, and that is eternity.”
A plant goes to sleep in the underworld, in the womb of the dark earth, and it dreams of waking in flowers. On the edge of this dream, bounded by the cycles of season, between the world of the living and the dead, when the first flower wakes, the bees and the songbirds return, and from flowers comes the fruit and the seed, and then the sleep again, and so the endless cycle of births and deaths that speaks to the human spirit of a time before time, of their own origin.
In the small infinity of human existence, flowers are eternal. Blossoming on Earth, before the first humans walked the land. Yet in the story of the life of Earth, their arrival is fairly new; if this story were told in an hour, flowers would appear in the end, only for 90 seconds. Marking a marvellous, colourful ending to a story that only had murky green creatures. Before colours took over the plant world, tempting the animals to pollinate and disperse the flowers and seeds, they relied on unpredictable forces of nature, wind and water. Reproduction was a matter of chance, full of uncertainty.
Then came flowers, opening the world to new possibilities and relationships. It was from the emergence of flowers, around 130 Million Years Ago, that the parasitic relationship between insects and plants became one of mutualism. Marking the beginning of co-evolution, flowers changed colours and shapes to attract their desired pollinators, and pollinators changed their forms for the taste of preferred plant kin. Like, the Asian columbine flowers, which might have drifted off, probably as seeds tucked into feathers, to North America, changed their colour to fit the sensory preference of hummingbirds, turning from blue to red.
Flowers have always been the symbol of transformation. Within the first 10 million years of their existence, flowers became highly successful species. Transforming the landscape and introducing new habitats, such as rainforests and grasslands. David George Haskell, in his new book, ‘How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries’, perceives flowers as a revolutionary species that not only created new ecologies but also changed the fate of their animal kin. He suggests primates probably won’t exist without flowering plants. In the Late Cretaceous period, from flowers came the fruits, and from feeding on fruits came primates. In mysterious ways, flowers have blossomed, the beginning of humankind.
Our relationship with flowers is a potent metaphor for the world that is now in a dormant state, crumbling under the brutal forces of disconnection. Flowers revolutionised the world with their beauty, a sign that not all endings are painful or violent; perhaps the disruption of old systems can turn parasitic connections into mutualism. Perhaps there is still hope even amidst the crisis. If not, then why would flowers bloom on Earth? If there is a heaven out there, it longs for the flowers of this world. Do you ever wonder why we offer flowers to the deceased?
