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How Flowers Made Our World

The Story of Nature's Revolutionaries
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How Flowers Made Our World

By: David George Haskell
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

In How Flowers Made Our World, biologist David Haskell redefines our understanding of flowers, casting them as powerful revolutionaries at the heart of Earth's story. Far from being mere ornaments, flowers have shaped the very fabric of life on our planet. When they first evolved, they triggered a cascade of biodiversity, transforming oceans, creating new habitats, and even altering the climate. Their beauty turned adversaries into allies, and their adaptability turned environmental upheavals into opportunities for renewal.

Haskell reveals how flowers have built and sustained ecosystems from rainforests to prairies, and how they have been pivotal in the evolution of species like butterflies, bees, and birds. Flowers also played a crucial role in human history, flowering grasses calling to our ancestors to leave the trees, laying down the foundation for agriculture and modern civilization.

Through vivid storytelling and profound insights, Haskell illuminates flowers as portals into deep time and essential players in our ecological future. How Flowers Made Our World invites readers to see these delicate blooms in a new light—as the dynamic and influential forces they truly are.

© David Haskell 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

 Biological Sciences Botany & Plants Nature & Ecology Outdoors & Nature Science

Critic reviews

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