239
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_26
Chapter 26
Botanical Equations for Paradox
26.1 The Language of Flowers
After the Impressionists had intimated every conceivable feeling, tinge, and resplendent form inherent to flowers, French Nobel Laureate Maurice Maeterlinck
(1862–1949) published his masterpiece Hours of Gladness,
1
sumptuously illustrated by E. J. Detmold. Nothing like it had ever been composed; no paean to flowers or to the civilizations of botany was ever so replete with life’s ceaselessly
declarative quintessence. Maeterlinck writes in his 79-page chapter “The Intelligence
of Flowers” “of the great systems of floral fertilization: the play of stamens and
pistil, the seduction of perfumes, the appeal of harmonious and dazzling colours, the
concoction of nectar….” He goes on to sing of the great champion within every
plant, and how “the energy of its fixed idea, mounting from the darkness of the roots
to become organized and full-blown in the flower, is an incomparable spectacle. It
exerts itself wholly with one sole aim: to escape above from the fatality below, to
evade, to transgress the heavy and somber law, to set itself free, to shatter the narrow
sphere, to invent or invoke wings….”
2
A flying fish. A butterfly whose metamorphosis takes it from the moribund up toward the stars (Fig. 26.1).
A brief phylogenetic history of flowers reminds us of that undefinable biological
ordination between the Ordovician and Silurian Periods, over 440 million years ago.
That is when plants first appeared on land and flowered by way of an evolutionary
strategy known as “dispersed spore.”
3
1 Translated by A. Teixeira De Mattos, George Allen & Co., London, 1912.
2 Maeterlinck, pp. 22–23.
3 See “The Earliest Land Plants,” by Patricia G. Gensel, in Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution,
and Systematics, Vol. 39:459–477, December 1, 2008, https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/
abs/10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.39.110707.173526, Accessed May 12, 2019.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_26
Chapter 26
Botanical Equations for Paradox
26.1 The Language of Flowers
After the Impressionists had intimated every conceivable feeling, tinge, and resplendent form inherent to flowers, French Nobel Laureate Maurice Maeterlinck
(1862–1949) published his masterpiece Hours of Gladness,
1
sumptuously illustrated by E. J. Detmold. Nothing like it had ever been composed; no paean to flowers or to the civilizations of botany was ever so replete with life’s ceaselessly
declarative quintessence. Maeterlinck writes in his 79-page chapter “The Intelligence
of Flowers” “of the great systems of floral fertilization: the play of stamens and
pistil, the seduction of perfumes, the appeal of harmonious and dazzling colours, the
concoction of nectar….” He goes on to sing of the great champion within every
plant, and how “the energy of its fixed idea, mounting from the darkness of the roots
to become organized and full-blown in the flower, is an incomparable spectacle. It
exerts itself wholly with one sole aim: to escape above from the fatality below, to
evade, to transgress the heavy and somber law, to set itself free, to shatter the narrow
sphere, to invent or invoke wings….”
2
A flying fish. A butterfly whose metamorphosis takes it from the moribund up toward the stars (Fig. 26.1).
A brief phylogenetic history of flowers reminds us of that undefinable biological
ordination between the Ordovician and Silurian Periods, over 440 million years ago.
That is when plants first appeared on land and flowered by way of an evolutionary
strategy known as “dispersed spore.”
3
1 Translated by A. Teixeira De Mattos, George Allen & Co., London, 1912.
2 Maeterlinck, pp. 22–23.
3 See “The Earliest Land Plants,” by Patricia G. Gensel, in Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution,
and Systematics, Vol. 39:459–477, December 1, 2008, https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/
abs/10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.39.110707.173526, Accessed May 12, 2019.