Vigilant and caring observers of nature tend to attribute human traits to flowers quite often. However, anthropomorphizing nature can be a controversial topic. Instead of wondering whether flowers are intelligent beings, I suggest we simply learn from them.

We shall see that the flower sets man a prodigious example of insubmission, courage, perseverance and ingenuity. If we had applied to the removal of various necessities that crush us, such as pain, old age and death, one half of the energy displayed by any little flower in our gardens, we may well believe that our lot would be very different from what it is.

Maurice Maeterlinck, 1907

Over the last 170 million years, flowers have developed mechanisms with levels of complexity that would surprise most engineers. The way plants adapt to the environment is an indication of great intelligence – it may be hard to notice in the case of a single flower, but it immediately becomes obvious when we start tracking the way species have improved from generation to generation.

Maurice Maeterlinck, fervent botanist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, claimed that flowers are both wise and cunning. They sometimes revert to tricks and ruses, they make mistakes, they suffer from disappointments and disillusionment. Furthermore, he asserted that the animal and plant kingdoms are separated by a “mysterious and probably imaginary ridge”, and so, if man believes