Today flowering plant species outnumber by twenty to one those of ferns and cone-bearing trees, or conifers, which had thrived for 200 million years before the first bloom appeared. But once they took firm root about 100 million years ago, they swiftly diversified in an explosion of varieties that established most of the flowering plant families of the modern world. That's relatively recent in geologic time: If all Earth's history were compressed into an hour, flowering plants would exist for only the last 90 seconds. They began changing the way the world looked almost as soon as they appeared on Earth about 130 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period. Sunflowers defined flowers for me that summer and changed my view of the world.įlowers have a way of doing that. I marveled at birds that clung upside down to the shaggy, gold disks, wings fluttering, looting the seeds. Their fiery halos relieved the green monotone that by late summer ruled the garden. Gradually, however, the brilliance of the sunflowers won me over. Such strange and vibrant flowers seemed out of place among the respectable beans, peppers, spinach, and other vegetables we had always grown. Only six years old at the time, I was at first put off by these garish plants. They seemed to sprout overnight in a few rows he had lent that year to new neighbors from California. In the summer of 1973 sunflowers appeared in my father's vegetable garden.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |