Flower Power

For many residents of Atlanta, the explosion of pollen in the spring is an assault on the senses leading to sneezing, coughing and itchy, watery eyes. Biologist David George Haskell, while not immune to these symptoms, sees pollen in a different light. All those floral catkins dangling from the branches of oaks, shaking yellow grains of pollen into the wind, are a display of vitality going back millions of years.

“Yes, pollen creates an allergy problem but it’s also an expression of the exuberance of plants,” says Haskell, adjunct professor of environmental sciences at Emory University. Although they may irritate us at times, “we need our green cousins to survive,” he adds. “Thank goodness we live in Atlanta, a place where there is so much plant life around us.”

Born in London and raised in France, Haskell spent nearly three decades teaching at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, before stepping down to focus more on writing. He’s the author of critically acclaimed books on ecology, including “Sounds Wild and Broken” and “The Forest Unseen,” both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, General Nonfiction.

In his latest book, “How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries,” he makes the case that humans are a floral species. Flowers catalyzed our evolution, became entwined with our sustenance and art, and offer lessons of resilience and inventiveness in the face of rapid environmental change.

The New York Times calls the book “a work of real passion,” while Kirkus Reviews describes it as “a fascinating examination of the enormous impact that flowering plants have had on all life.”  

Haskell now lives in Atlanta, within walking distance of Emory, where he’s held the adjunct faculty position since last July.

His connection to Emory goes further back than that.

In 2024, Haskell delivered the annual Nix-Mann Endowed Lecture at the Michael C. Carlos Museum and was featured in the Emory CompFest music series. The theme for the festival that year was “Ecologies of Sound.” Haskell gave a talk explaining that “a lot of music is the second voice of the forest,” as many instruments are made of wood that carries the vibration of the sound.

On the night of one of the CompFest concerts he hooked up listening devices to trees near the Performing Arts Center so people could listen, live, to the inside of a tree. “When the wind is blowing, the wood amplifies the rattling of the leaves,” Haskell says. “And if you put a microphone down by a tree’s roots it picks up the percussive effect of big trucks going by.”

Haskell has made friends across the university as a member of an informal faculty book club centered on the Anthropocene, which refers to the time since humanity became a primary driver of planetary change.

“At Emory, faculty from chemistry and philosophy and English get together and talk about all kinds of things,” Haskell says. “Often people get walled off into boxes but that’s not been my experience here. And that’s great for students, to be in a place where there’s lots of cross-pollination of ideas.”

Haskell has done guest lectures and met with students interested in combining knowledge of science with writing for popular audiences. While he’s currently wrapped up in a promotional tour for “How Flowers Made the World,” he says he looks forward to more ways he can become involved with the Emory community in the fall.

In the following Q&A, he talks about his new home of Atlanta and his fascination with flowering plants.

What set you on the path to nature writing?

I see my writing as an extension of teaching. About 15 years ago, I decided I wanted to break down the walls of classrooms to share knowledge that is often locked up within science departments. These are amazing stories, sometimes troubling stories, that we need to get out into the world.

A lot of my colleagues here at Emory are also writing books for popular audiences out of that same desire to tell important stories and encourage intelligent, thoughtful community.

What prompted you to move to a big city like Atlanta?

We moved here partly because my partner, Katherine Lehman, took a job as executive and artistic director of Spivey Hall at Clayton State University.

Another draw is my connection to Emory, which is one of the world leaders in studying the environment. And Atlanta is an ecological hub. It has one of the highest percentages of tree-canopy covers of any major metro area in the world. Few cities have more bird life or such an incredible diversity of plants. Because of the climate here, there is something in bloom every month of the year. Even in winter, camellias are in bloom.

There is a lot of good environmental activism happening in Atlanta as well, people working at the grassroots level to promote connection to the land and the ecological vitality of the place.

How are you cultivating your yard?

Our house is quite shaded so we plan to grow things that are more shade tolerant.

I believe in supporting the local ecology by choosing plants like native azaleas and blueberries, mountain mint, beautyberry and May apples. These are plants that have been part of the ecology here for thousands of years. Carolina false buckthorn is another great addition. It’s a beautiful plant that produces lots of nectar for pollinators and lots of berries in the fall for birds.

Some of my favorite plants in my yard are the weeds growing in the cracks in my driveway, like bittercress and violets. This is beauty erupting in an unexpected place. To me that feels hopeful. It’s delightful and it inspires me.

Bittercress has spread around the world because it does very well in disturbed environments. When people mow bittercress it will literally keep its head down by growing low to the ground. And where it is rarely mowed, it grows a really long stalk.

The violets are interesting because they can self-pollinize to produce back-up flowers in case bees don’t come around. That’s one more way that flowering plants have figured out how to thrive.

I also love cinquefoils, little golden jewels scattered across the grass.

If you just stop pumping nitrogen and pesticides into your lawn you’ll get this amazing meadow. A lawn care company would not be impressed. But it’s green, it’s giving life, and it’s stopping erosion.

What’s another of your favorite flowering plants?

Magnolias, huge, big trees with flowers that are really in your face, the size of dinner plates. Magnolias are little changed over 100 million years, since the time of Tyrannosaurs rex.

Little beetles come to feed on the pollen and efficiently transport that pollen to other flowers. The same type of beetles entrapped in fossils 99 million years ago can be seen on magnolias blooming here in late spring and early summer.

And the aroma of magnolias is really layered and transporting.

Aroma is a very primal sense. The sense of smell goes directly to the part of the brain associated with emotion and memory. So flower aromas speak to the places in us that are most likely to form deep memories.

It’s part of the genius of flowers that they connect us with other animals and people. We’ve incorporated the language of flowers into our cultures and we often grow flowers because they remind us of someone. These connections within families are important.

What are your family flower stories?

My mother lives in Scotland where the winters are long. Snowdrops, these little white flowers, are the first sign of spring there. Whenever I see them, they remind me of my family.

My mother is also an orchid enthusiast. We lived in France when I was young and she would take us out to the meadows to look for tiny, wild orchids. Through my mother’s enthusiasm and knowledge, we learned to enjoy hunting for them — not to dig them up, but to observe and appreciate them.

The orchid family is the biggest family of flowering plants. Lady’s slipper orchids are probably the most famous ones here in the U.S. Southeast because they’re big and showy.

You can also see crane-fly orchids growing in Lullwater Preserve on the Emory campus. Their pollen sacs are sticky and get “superglued” onto the eyeballs of moths. These moths are partly blinded by the pollen as they carry the pollen to other flowers.

What was the most fun part of working on your current book?

Researching the chapter on obscure flowering plants known as seagrasses. They bloom under the ocean, growing in big meadows that provide important habitat. A lot of fish and shellfish breed in seagrasses and nowhere else.

Because they trap so much sediment, seagrasses can lock up carbon 30 to 50 times faster than forests. And not only that, they hold onto the carbon for thousands of years. They’re not very flashy, but seagrasses are unsung climate champions. They’re also in precipitous decline.

To learn about them I went to the Firth of Forth, a tidal estuary in Scotland near Edinburgh, where my sister lives. I planted seeds into stinky, tidal mud and met some amazing conservationists who are working to restore these seagrass meadows.

What are you most looking forward to?

More opportunities to invite people to engage with plants and animals right here in Atlanta. It’s a fun and enriching way to connect with some important questions. How did the ecosystems that support us come to be? How should we deal with biodiversity loss and climate change?

Healthy ecosystems are the foundation of collective well-being.

And there’s a great hunger in students for a connection to real, embodied experience. Many studies show that mental health and wellbeing is enhanced by paying close attention to the natural world around us.

A lot of my research involves going back to the same place over-and-over again and seeing where that attention takes me.  Basically, doing a meditation on a tree or a street corner.

By focusing in on something, we can see things a little more crisply. Like a pinhole camera, which is simple but works because the aperture is very small.  The paradox is that through close-up, repeated attention we can gain little glimpses of the universal.

Interview and design by Carol Clark. Images courtesy David George Haskell, except where otherwise noted.