How do flowers know when to bloom?

CrowdScience

BBC

Science

4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 September 2021

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This year has been a weird one for UK gardeners – unpredictable spring temperatures meant flowers failed to bloom and throughout the rainy summer, slugs have been savaging salad crops. But why and when plants blossom is about more than just early cold spells and wet weather, and a listener in California has asked Crowdscience to investigate.

Flowering is vital to both plants and us. Without it, they wouldn’t be able to evolve and survive (and we wouldn’t have anything to eat). Anand Jagatia hears that different species have developed different strategies for doing this based on all sorts of things, from where they’re located to how big they are to what kind of insects are around to pollinate them. The famously stinky Titan Arum, or corpse flower, for example, blooms for a single day once every decade or so before collapsing on itself and becoming dormant again.

This gives it the best chance of attracting carrion beetles in the steamy Sumatran jungle. But other plants open their petals much more regularly, which is a process regulated by a clever internal clock that can sense daylight and night. It’s even possible to trick some of them into producing flowers out of season. Cold is also a vital step for some brassicas and trees, and scientists are starting to understand the genes involved. But as climate change makes winters in parts of the world warmer and shorter, there are worrying knock on effects for our food supply.

Produced by Marijke Peters for BBC World Service.

Featuring:

Guy Barter, RHS Professor Judy Jernstedt, UC Davis Professor Dame Caroline Dean, John Innes Centre Professor Ove Nilsson, Umea Plant Science Centre

(Photo credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of
0:07.0	Happiness Podcast.
0:08.0	For the last 20 years I've dedicated my career to exploring the science of living a happier more meaningful life and I want
0:14.4	to share that science with you.
0:16.1	And just one thing, deep calm with Michael Mosley.
0:19.4	I want to help you tap in to your hidden relaxation response system and open the door to that
0:25.4	calmer place within. Listen on BBC Sounds. My name is CJ Addington. I am a science teacher at Roseville High School just outside of Sacramento, capital of California.
0:39.0	And as far as I can tell, we are the only high school in the world that's ever successfully bloom
0:44.4	corpse flowers. Welcome to Crowd Science from the BBC World Service. I'm Annan
0:50.3	Jagatia and if you're a regular listener to this show you'll know that we're
0:54.3	quite fond of corpse flowers. It's an amazing plant that goes by many names.
0:59.5	Latin name, a mofofallus titanum which means a gigantic mis-shaped and penis.
1:05.6	That is genuinely what the translation is, and it is a sight to behold.
1:10.5	Three meters tall, with a huge yellow spear sticking up out of a giant green and red frilly skirt
1:17.2	but the thing that it's really famous for is its smell. You going to regret this I think.
1:23.0	Oh, that's so horrible.
1:27.0	Does the smell of rotting meat and it's so like vivid.
1:32.0	That's me sticking my head inside a giant corpse flower in 2018 for our previous
1:37.2	episode do you smell what I smell? It's quite disturbing actually. You can sniff that one out in our podcast archive, but on this show
1:45.6	we're looking at a completely different aspect of this incredible species biology.
1:49.7	It's the fact that they take up to 10 years to flower, and when they finally do, they only bloom for a single stinky day.
1:58.0	And for science teacher, CJ, that's exactly what captured his imagination when he decided to take on the challenge and grow one himself.
	...

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