Why are flowers beautiful?

In the 1930s, American artist Georgia O'Keefe once wrote: 'What will my experience be if flowers are not colored?' . O'Keefe is a very famous painter with close-up oil paintings of petals and vivid colorful stamens.

People love flowers because of their color, composition, style and fragrance. But is the satisfaction of human passion eyes the purpose of nature in the style of each flower?

Claude de Pamphilis, a Pennsylvania-based plant evolutionary biologist and principal investigator of the Plant Genome Project, stresses the plant's top priority is survival. Pamphilis said: 'The beauty of flowers is a by-product that helps them attract pollinators. The beauty that we admire in flowers is the instruction for pollinators, to help tell them that there are rewards for them on the flower '.

The scent, color and size of flowers all attract a lot of pollinators, including thousands of honey bees. Hornets, butterflies, caterpillars and beetles. Besides, there are some vertebrate animals such as birds and bats.

Flying insects include many pollinators. They park on flowers to eat honey and collect pollen. Then they distributed pollen by visiting other flowers. According to Pamphilis, ' pollinators are providing plants with an important service that lacks that service they cannot reproduce '.

To help insects find nectar and pollen, many flowering plants have evolved to possess eye-catching colors (hummingbirds and butterflies that prefer red and yellow flowers). Some signs of directions to nectar can only be seen under ultraviolet light - a visible light spectrum of bees and humans are not. From the bee's eyes, UV-colored petals and textures inform them of where to hide nectar and pollen.

The painting " White Flower on Red Earth " by Georgia O'Keefe artist
(Photo: Meupapeldeparedegratis)

The pattern on flowers that both humans and visible pollinators (such as petal stripes) act as an air traffic control system for bees, helps direct them to the pollen and nectar in the center. Thanks to the co-evolutionary trait between the two species, bees can visit many flowers and pollinate a large number of plants.

Some flowers, such as horse chestnut or sunflower plants, change color under the ultraviolet spectrum throughout their lifespan. As Phamphilis explains, for pollinators, these changes are signs that they are more or less lacking in honey. Those signs will tell you: ' Come visit me ' or ' Don't bother '.

To learn more about the evolution of the relationship between pollinators and flowers, Pamphilis and her colleagues used DNA sequencing to delve into the evolutionary history of flowers.'What we are trying to do is deduce in a detailed way, based on the genetic basis of the characteristics of the first flowering plants'.

According to the fossils obtained, the first flowers bloomed around 125 to 140 million years ago. Pamphilis has asked the question: 'Why are only those first flowers that produce thousands of different flower varieties we see in nature now? Maybe the genetic map will explain the beginning of this story. '

While most flowers for humans are beautiful and have a pleasant aroma, some species develop ways to lure their pollinators in a way that people cannot tolerate. The species Rafflesia lives in Indonesia, for example, according to experts, this is the largest flower in the world, it is up to 3 feet. In addition to its upright appearance, the Rafflesia flower also stands out with a scent like rotten meat. Despite the terrible smell of corpses, the flower of Rafflesia arnoldii has an irresistible appeal to its special pollinators - flies.

Maybe we have to wonder why Georgia O'Keefe, who created the art from the beautiful flowers and animal skulls in plaster, can draw pictures of ugly flowers but it's hard. forget this.

" Sacred Datura bloom " painting by Georgia O'Keefe artist
(Photo: Desertusa.com)