Flowers aren’t just pretty. They are powerful architects of life on Earth

Mother’s Day is a time to recognize everything moms do — and for many, that appreciation is often expressed through the gift of flowers.

Known for their beauty and fragrance, flowers have long been used to express emotion: love, gratitude, celebration — or simply the desire to brighten someone’s day.

In 2025, more than 425 million flowers were cut in greenhouses across the country, according to a Statistics Canada study. 

But biologist David George Haskell says that while we tend to admire flowers for how they look and smell, we often miss the bigger story of how they evolved.

Flowering plants, he says, first appeared about 130 million years ago and quickly spread across the planet. Today, they make up roughly 90 per cent of all plant species on Earth. 

One of their key breakthroughs, according to Haskell, was bringing together the male and female reproductive structures in a single flower. 

Before flowers evolved, he says, those roles were often separated across different parts of a plant — or even across different plants altogether.

“It means that any insect that is visiting the flower can both bring and take away pollen, which is an amazingly efficient way of reproduction,” Haskell told The Sunday Magazine’s host Piya Chattopadhyay. 

To draw attention to insects and other pollinators, flowers evolved to showcase visually striking petals and fragrant scents, he says.  

Though natural mechanisms like wind can also move pollen around, insect pollination works much better, as it allows the fine particles to be transferred with impressive precision. 

The evolutionary genius of flowers was their ability to create entirely new partnerships between plants and animals, says Haskell, the author of How Flowers Made Our World. 

“For hundreds of millions of years, insects had been almost nothing but trouble for eating the leaves, sucking on the sap, chewing on the roots,” he said. 

“Flowers flip the narrative, they turn some of these former enemies into co-operative partners.”

This also helps explain why flowers come in so many different shapes, colours and scents, says Susan Dudley, a biology professor at McMaster University who specializes in plant evolution. 

Their diversity, she says, reflects millions of years of co-evolution with animals, as well as adaptations that help attract pollinators more effectively.

Hummingbird-pollinated flowers tend to be red; moth-pollinated flowers are pale, night-blooming and strongly scented, while flowers pollinated by flies often mimic “rotting meat or feces,” said Dudley. 

Meanwhile, bees — some of the most important pollinators — are drawn to flowers that are typically blue, yellow or pink. These flowers often have a built-in landing pad, known as a lip, that lets bees touch down and then crawl inside. 

“Flowers are very pretty, but they’re not doing it for us,” said Dudley. 

The intricate workings of flowers 

Flowers also developed clever ways to give their offspring a head start — innovations that ended up feeding much of the living world, Haskell said. Namely, fruit: it’s a mature flower that wraps and protects each seed.

Fruit also helps seeds travel. While flowers solve the problem of pollination, Dudley says, fruit tackles what comes next: dispersal. Bright, fleshy fruit encourages animals to carry seeds away from the parent plant. 

For example, a strawberry bundles many seeds together so they’re eaten and dropped as a group. 

Other plants use different tactics. Some let seeds fall straight to the ground. Others hitch rides on fur or feathers. Some fruits burst open when touched, while others — like coconuts — are built to float across oceans, Dudley says. 

Nectar-rich flowers and fleshy fruits changed what animals could eat and how they lived. Species like hummingbirds, which rely on nectar, and American robins, which feed on berries, exist because plants co-evolved to feed and attract them, says Quentin Cronk, a professor of botany at the University of British Columbia. 

“Plants are the ‘foundation species’ of ecosystems,” he said. “They don’t just support ecosystems, they determine them — and the animals that live in them.” 

When humans intervene 

Humans, however, can disrupt these carefully balanced relationships, says Dudley, particularly when flowers are bred mainly for aesthetics — like modern roses with their layers of petals — that may be visually striking but offer little value to bees and other pollinators.

Dudley encourages people to rethink their relationship with flowers, something she often notices when guiding visitors through the greenhouse.

“We often go from the viewpoint of, ‘How is this useful to me?’ [to] ‘We can also appreciate the natural beauty of the flowers that is there for the bees and the butterflies and the moths.” 

Careful gardening, says Haskell, can make a real difference for flowers and the life that depends on them — from skipping pesticides to planting local species that support the whole ecosystem. 

In his own North American garden, Haskell planted native asters next to imported chrysanthemums, and the contrast in bee life and other wildlife, he says, “is stunning.” 

Ultimately, he hopes the next time people are given flowers, they’ll pause and see them in a new light.

“I would love people to … consider the world from the flower’s perspective,” said Haskell. 

“Let that curiosity and connection lead you into asking questions about not just our relationship with plants and flowers, but how flowers came to remake the world when they evolved.”