How Flowers Made Our World

David 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

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 World

'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

A 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 Atlantic

Flowering plants as you've never seen them before: these flowers are the sneaky, sexy, volatile, opportunistic rebels of the vegetal world. They turned the planet on its head and, as David George Haskell demonstrates so masterfully, they have so much still to teach us. Science writing with sensuality, sensitivity and soul.

Cal Flyn, Author of Islands of Abandonment

A fascinating examination of the enormous impact that flowering plants have had on all life ... An edifying celebration

Kirkus Reviews - starred review

In his illuminating and entertaining How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries, [Haskell] combines meticulous, extensive research with irresistible enthusiasm . . . Each chapter is rife with fascinating information

Bookpage starred review

A work of real passion... a trustworthy companion, rational but not entirely rationalist, knowledgeable but understanding of what the ignorant need to know, expert but — and this may be a surprising word for a book of popular biology — kind...You feel like cheering. More Haskells, please, and more flowers.

Adam Nicolson, New York Times

Haskell's love for flowers shines off the page . . . deeply researched, rich with insights and often vivid - with much to recommend it.

Michael Marshall, New Scientist

Haskell tells a story that is vividly compelling and underpinned by forensic scientific detail. A gripping, informative read.

The Field

Eye-opening ... [Haskell] is a lively writer with an appealingly light touch, but his message about ‘the astonishing creativity and productivity of flowers’ is a serious one.

Constance Craig Smith, Daily Mail

[Haskell's] exuberant prose engages all our senses, beckoning us, the way a flower would a curious bee, into a world of hidden wonders.

Christoph Irmscher, Wall Street Journal