X-Book

How Flowers Made Our World

Click Buy to Log in and see personalised pricing.

Send as a gift Get in the xigxag app
How does xigxag pricing work?

Listen to a sample

What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

In How Flowers Made Our World, biologist David George Haskell redefines our understanding of flowers, casting them as powerful revolutionaries at the heart of Earth's story.

Far from being mere ornaments, flowers have shaped the very fabric of life on our planet. Their evolution triggered a cascade of biodiversity, transforming oceans, creating new habitats, and even altering the climate. Their beauty turned adversaries into allies, and their adaptability turned environmental upheavals into opportunities for renewal.

Weaving together vivid storytelling, lyrical writing, and cutting-edge science, Haskell illuminates flowers as portals into deep time and essential players in our ecological future. He reveals how flowers built and sustained ecosystems from rainforests to prairies and have been pivotal in the evolution of species like butterflies, bees, and birds. He also uncovers their crucial role in human history, as cultural emblems, keys to scientific leaps, and evolutionary catalysts, with flowering grasses calling our ancestors to leave the trees, laying the foundation for agriculture and modern civilization.

From lessons in resilience and creativity found among gardeners’ favourites, such as magnolias, orchids, and roses, to rediscovering lesser-known wonders, like our uncelebrated underwater meadows that sustain life and the secrets of our most humble wildflowers, How Flowers Made Our World invites readers to see these blooms in a whole new light—as the dynamic and influential forces they truly are.

"Flowering plants as you've never seen them before ... Science writing with sensuality, sensitivity and soul." Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment

"Vividly written. David George Haskell shows how the most trivialized part of the natural world is among its most powerful and essential.” —Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell’s Roses

"David George Haskell's great strength as a writer is that he is open to surprise. He regards the planet as a strange and beautiful place. How Flowers Made Our World is at once closely observed, richly reported, and mind-blowing.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

© David Haskell 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Critics Review

Eye-opening ... [Haskell] is a lively writer with an appealingly light touch, but his message about ‘the astonishing creativity and productivity of flowers’ is a serious one.
Daily Mail
Haskell's love for flowers shines off the page . . . deeply researched, rich with insights and often vivid - with much to recommend it.
New Scientist
[Haskell's] exuberant prose engages all our senses, beckoning us, the way a flower would a curious bee, into a world of hidden wonders.
Wall Street Journal
A work of real passion... a trustworthy companion, rational but not entirely rationalist, knowledgeable but understanding of what the ignorant need to know, expert but — and this may be a surprising word for a book of popular biology — kind...You feel like cheering. More Haskells, please, and more flowers.
New York Times
A fascinating examination of the enormous impact that flowering plants have had on all life ... An edifying celebration
Kirkus Reviews - starred review
In this dazzling book, scintillating with wonder and scholarship, Haskell shows us how flowers – so often belittled and misunderstood, have shaped ecology, and so shaped us. Flowers are tectonic, and here is a book worthy of them.
Charles Foster, author of The Edges of the World
A tender portrait of flowering plants as powerful agents of change. Flowers wield beauty as a world-making force, actively shaping the planet—and, by extension, us. This book is a joyful exhortation to floral reverence, and brims with curiosity, humour, and crystal-clear scientific delights. We are all more in sway of flowers than we think. Richly precise, How Flowers Made Our World is a celebration of the inventiveness of floral life.
Zoë Schlanger, author of The Light Eaters, staff writer, The Atlantic
David George Haskell's great strength as a writer is that he is open to surprise. He regards the planet as a strange and beautiful place. How Flowers Made Our World is at once closely observed, richly reported, and mind-blowing.
Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction
'Who runs the world? Girls!’ sang Beyoncé a while back, but really it’s flowers and flowering plants that run this world and have for more than a hundred million years. In this vividly written book, David George Haskell shows how they do that, how flowering plants made the modern world from prairies and rainforests to bees and butterflies, how the most trivialized part of the natural world is among its most powerful and essential.
Rebecca Solnit, writer, historian, and activist, author of Orwell’s Roses
Flowering plants as you've never seen them before: these flowers are the sneaky, sexy, volatile, opportunistic rebels of the vegetal world. They turned the planet on its head and, as David George Haskell demonstrates so masterfully, they have so much still to teach us. Science writing with sensuality, sensitivity and soul.
Cal Flyn, Author of Islands of Abandonment
Author David George Haskell
Narrator Cassandra Campbell, David George Haskell
Duration 11 hours and 6 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781529970425
Format Audiobook
Publisher Transworld
Genre Botany and plant sciences, The Earth: natural history: general interest, Trees, wildflowers and plants: general interest
Availability AU, GB, IE

More from the same

Author

About xigxag

xigxag is an independent, UK-based audiobook platform and the UK’s only B Corp certified audiobook company. We offer nearly 150,000 audiobooks, all with professional human narration. No AI-generated voices. xigxag is rated an Ethical Consumer Best Buy for audiobooks and a top-rated ethical bookshop.

There is no subscription. You buy the audiobooks you want, you own them permanently, and prices start at £8.99. The more you listen over the year, the less you pay per book, and there is always a selection in Listen for Less from £3.99. You can also send audiobooks as gifts using our audiobook gift cards or in-app gifting.

Every audiobook on xigxag has honest reviews covering both the book and the narration, and our community features make it easy to share what you are listening to, discover what others recommend, and find your next listen.

Download or stream on iOS, Android, or in your browser. Browse the full catalogue at xigxag.co.uk.