LOVE IS IN THE AIR

The natural world as we know it wouldn't exist without pollination. We delve into the cool science of plant sex

- LEIF BERSWEDEN

Plants, in all their charismatic forms, are most famous – and most celebrated – for their flowers. Eight in ten species have them, and they come in all shapes and sizes. Cowslips and honeysuckles are equipped with trumpet-like, tubular flowers, while thistles have punky, purple flowerheads made up of lots of tiny blooms. There are miniature, corn-on-the-cob eelgrass flowers, water-lily flowers the size of your fist, and orchid flowers that mimic insects.

Why all this diversity? Well, you see, a plant has needs.

When mating season comes around, flowering plants engage in all the same behaviours as we do. They spruce themselves up, paying attention to how they look, how they smell and how they dress. And then, when they’re ready, they flirt. To walk through a hay meadow in June is to witness plants unashamedly getting their groove on. Just like in a nightclub, the air is full of perfume and there’s eyeing-up-and-down occurring everywhere you look.

But here’s where things are slightly different. Flowering plants aren’t trying to seduce each other. Not directly, at least. For millions of years, conifer-like, seed-producing plants used airborne pollen (generated by the male parts) to fertilise each other, but female reproductive surfaces are small, and a lot of it went to waste. Plants needed a more targeted courier service for collecting and delivering pollen, something more precise and economical than random gusts of wind. So they evolved flowers to attract insects (and later, other animals, such as birds and bats). Today, flowers are used by 80 per cent of plants to reproduce.