Then the world changed color.
For a hundred million years
The green had been gymnosperm—the dark and heavy
Green of Conifera's needles, the austere
And wind-pollinated world where every levy
Of pollen flew in clouds of golden dust
On the Mesozoic wind, profligate
And wasteful—a billion grains, and just
A few would find their target, the mandate
Of the conifer's reproduction: flood the air
With pollen and rely on the statistics
Of the wind to carry a grain somewhere
That mattered—the crude and ancient logistics
Of the gymnosperm's seed-making.
But in the early
Cretaceous undergrowth, among the ferns
And cycads, something new appeared: the rarely
Beautiful, the quietly transformative—the turns
Of evolution that change everything
Without the drama of extinction—Angios,
The flowering plants, who offered something
That the gymnosperms had never thought to pose:
A bargain.
The flower was a contract written
In color and in scent: come to me,
Said the angiosperm, be smitten
With my nectar—drink it free—
And in exchange, carry my pollen
On your body to the next flower's door—
Deliver it precisely—no wind-swollen
Cloud of wasted grains but the targeted core
Of pollen placed exactly where it must go
By the body of the pollinator,
The insect or the bird or the bat whose flow
Of visitation was the navigator
Of the angiosperm's reproduction—and the cost
Of a little nectar was repaid a thousand-fold
By the efficiency of what was never lost
To the wind's indifferent, pollen-scattering hold.
Angios was the daughter of Gymnos—
Descended from the seed-plant's ancient line
But revolutionary in her cosmos
Of innovation: the flower as the sign
And the fruit as the reward.
For the fruit was
The second bargain: eat me, said the apple,
The berry, the drupe—digest the flesh that does
You good, and carry in your gut the chapel
Of my seeds to distant ground—and plant them there
In the fertile soil of your dropping, rich
With the nutrients I could never have—the fare
Of the animal's digestive niche
Becoming the angiosperm's dispersal method.
Color, scent, nectar, fruit—the toolkit
Of the flowering plant was the most unexpected
And transformative innovation, a trick
That rewrote every ecosystem on the earth.
Neopter's children—the insects—bloomed
Alongside the flowers in a co-evolved birth
Of staggering diversity: the doomed
And joyful partnership of bee and blossom,
Of butterfly and orchid, of the wasp
And fig—each pair evolving the awesome
And intimate specificity of the clasp
Between pollinator and the pollinated—
Each flower shaped to fit its visitor,
Each visitor's body calibrated
To the flower's architecture, the solicitor
And the client locked in an embrace
That drove both to new extremes of form:
Longer tongues for deeper nectaries, the race
Of coevolution's perpetual storm
That would ultimately produce more species
Of flowering plant and insect than all other
Lineages combined—the masterpieces
Of evolution's most productive mother.
The dinosaurs ate the new plants gladly—
The hadrosaurs and ceratopsians
Of the late Cretaceous would develop badly
If the flowers failed—their special plans
For grinding teeth and gut-fermentation
Were tuned to the angiosperm's new provisions—
And the mammals in the nighttime's station
Found the fruits and seeds, the small decisions
Of the forest floor enriched by the flower's gift.
The world that the flower made was not
The austere gymnosperm cathedral's lift
Of dark green columns—but the polychrome thought
Of a meadow in full bloom: red, yellow, white,
Purple, blue, and every shade between—
The advertising of the flower's bright
And market-driven beauty, the obscene
Profligacy of the beautiful
Whose beauty is not waste but the precise
And calculated broadcast—dutiful
To the pollinator's eye—and that suffice
To remake every landscape on the earth.
Honor Angios—the flowering one,
Who changed the color of the planet's girth
And made the partnership beneath the sun
Between the flower and the wing, the root
And the tongue—the most productive contract
In the history of life, the fruit
Of which we still consume in every act
Of eating, smelling, seeing—for the flower
Is the source of nearly everything we grow,
And Angios' Cretaceous hour
Is the hour that made the world we know.