I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

When flowers appeared within a few million years, They took over most of the planet.

You think of most ecosystems now, rainforests,

prairies, even human agriculture dominated by flaring plants.

And yet the flower itself is very ephemeral structure

at last sometimes just a few hours or a few days.

And yet flowers are such amazing engines of innovation and of interconnectivity of networking

with other creatures that they quite literally remade the planet.

I call them revolutionaries.

Once they evolved, planet Earth was never again the same.

That's David Haskell.

He's written a book that's truly eye-opening, certainly for me.

I'll never look at a flower again and see only its beauty.

It's David's latest book in which he revels in the interconnectedness of living things,

ourselves included.

The new book is How Flowers Made Our World.

Well, this is great. You're such a great communicator, and you open our eyes to things we didn't know

we're there. For instance, in that wonderful TED talk, where you declare that you are not a unit of life, and then it

turns out I'm not either, and that got me really upset.

In what way are we not units?

How wonderful to be a living community, thank you, Alan.

Yes, in the talk, I talked a little about trees and how when we look at an individual

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