AMAZING FLOWERING PLANTS
The shrubs and trees and spring flowers are putting on a spectacular flower show.  Flowering plants in the garden shops beg you to take them home and help them show off their blossoms in your yard.
            Did you know that there was a time in the history of our planet that green plants existed without flowers? During the age of the gigantic dinosaurs, all of the big plants were evergreens that did not have flowers. There were lots of insects but, without flowering plants, there were no bees or butterflies. In 1998 scientists believe that they found fossil evidence in China of the world’s oldest flowering plant – a peapod shaped fruit containing seeds – about 142 million years old. (Reported by Paul Recer, Associated Press, November 27, 1998)
 “Flowers changed the face of the planet. Without them, the world we know – even man himself – would never have existed.” (A quote from the late scientist and poet Loren Eiseley, a distinguished anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, National Wildlife April/May 1996). Eiseley explains that the agile brains of warm-blooded birds and mammals require the energy that flowering plants provide in the seeds that contain “fully equipped embryonic plants packed in a little enclosed box stuffed full of nutritious food.”
            Moreover seeds are tailored so that plants travel as plants had never traveled before, carried by the wind, the fur of an animal, or eaten by birds and passed undigested many miles away. “These fantastic little seeds, skipping and hopping and flying about the woods and valleys,” continues Eiseley, “brought with them an amazing adaptability. If our whole lives had not been spent in the midst of it, it would astound us. …Most important of all, [flowering plants] produced concentrated foods in a way that the land had never seen before.  The foods all came from the reproductive system of the flowering plants.”
            When their marvelous reproductive system puts pollen in the air and makes some of us sneeze, we need to be reminded that all common plant foods came into existence with flowering plants. Without them there would be no fruit, no morning breakfast cereal, no corn or potatoes, no wheat for flour for bread or pasta, and so on!
            As if the beauty of flowers were not enough reason to have them in the landscape, the high protein content of the pollen is food for insects. And insects are at the bottom of the food chain for birds and other animals.
            If you enjoy the beauty of flowers or you spend time tending flowering plants in your yard and garden, take time to reflect on how flowers demonstrate the interconnectedness of all living things including humans.

Della Moen, Earth Team Volunteer, NRCS/Stephenson Soil and Water
Conservation District, an equal opportunity provider and employer, 05/21/09 (for publication on 05/30/09 in the Journal-Standard, Freeport, Illinois). Della can be reached at info@stephensonswcd.org