Nature can be chock full of mysteries, as we all know. Flowers are one of those mysteries that sometimes confound us. In many cases, that's a good thing!
Why Flowers Are Everywhere
Flowering plants form a class of plants called angiosperms, and as you may have noticed, they’re everywhere. What may come as a surprise, however, is that this was not always the case. Flowering plants took over other plant types in a quick time period about 400 million years ago, and as a result they constitute about 90 percent of all plant species today.
The problem worried Charles Darwin so much that he called it “an abominable mystery.” Rapid evolution of flowers shortly after their origins ran directly against his theories of slow evolution through natural selection. And there is nothing evolutionarily beneficial about flower-producing plants—for the nutrient cost of making flowers, the plant could invest in growth or other things that could put them higher on the evolutionary ladder. Because plants don’t leave any fossil records when they die, it has been difficult to determine how this hobo species came from nowhere and so quickly conquered everything else.
This is one of those times when I don't really care why the flowers grow where they do, but all I know is that I like it for the most part! I'd rather have a vacant lot full of wildflowers next door than some of my present neighbors, ya know?
Coffee out on the patio again today. Gotta beat the rain!
