“Abominable” is not the sort of word that most people may associate with flowers, but for Darwin, it was a perfect fit. He saw life on Earth today as the result of millions of years of victories and defeats in the evolutionary arena. Flowering plants, by that reasoning, were among the greatest champions of all. There are some 250,000 known species of flowering plants, and the total is probably double that. The closest living relatives of flowering plants (pine trees, firs, gingkos, and the like—collectively known as gymnosperms) make up a grand total of just over 800. These numbers are all the more remarkable when you consider that flowering plants emerged around 140 million years ago, and gymnosperms had already