All the Dirt on Gardening

Normally, I would just provide a link to a column online but the NYT Opinionator links have been behaving unpredictably and you will want to read this one. Here is the link - the footnotes are worth reading if you can get there from here. "Breezy Love, or the Sacking of the Bees" Birds do it. Bees do it. Beetles, bats and light summer breezes do it. I refer, of course, to that raunchiest of sex acts: the pollination of flowers. When it comes to sex, plants have more headaches than the rest of us. One problem is that they can’t travel about to find a mate — they are, after all, rooted to the spot — so they have to depend on intermediaries to bring egg and sperm cells together. For mosses and ferns, the intermediary is water. For conifers like pine trees and cypresses, the intermediary is wind. But for most flowering plants, the intermediaries are animals. Flowering plants are the largest, most successful group of plants on the planet today. There are thought to be more than q...