more on inflorescence

Isn’t it just amazing that we have flowers? (I know I sometimes sound like i’m on lsd, but honestly, I have seriously never touched the stuff). Not just that flowers exist, but that there’s almost infinite variety in their shape, colour, function, size, timing (seasonal and daily).

I have a vivid memory from my early childhood of watching a water lily open up to catch the emerging sunlight. Never seen anything like it since, and even at the time I wasn’t sure it could be real, a flower opening that quickly. But if it wasn’t real, why should I have perceived it?

Of course, it’s by no means limited to flowers. And it’s largely about sex… most evidently when all these birds and mammals put on elaborate, unweildy and incredibly impractical additions as soon as it’s springtime, in the hope of spreading their genes around. It’s usually the males, natch. How unlikely is it that there’s a whole genre of birds that construct scoopy-looking frames of grass and fill them with trinkets of a particular colour (peculiar to the species) in order to demonstrate their genetic superiority? I guess they’re saying “I have such strong genes that I can waste time finding bic pen lids to strew around my lovely bower”. And this message is understood by the lady bowerbird… unbelievable.

With this sort of incentive or competition, it makes sense that nature’s creations enlarge, brighten up and diversify in a way that no fractal screensaver could ever come close to.