Ask any flowering plant, “Why are you growing?”

Conventional 1800s, Sherlock Holmes science tells us, “Plants grow to make seeds.” If you have ever spent time with young children, this is intuitively ignorant and untrue. No flowering plant grows just to make seeds. Just ask any flowering plant.

After a growing season, no plant writes home to Mother Nature to celebrate, “What big seeds I made this year.”

They write home to Mother, to tell her, “What big FLOWERS I made this year.”

Plants are proudest of the flowers they made.

Seeds are okay, part of the job. If you get a big flower you are for sure going to get many or big seeds. If you get only a small flower for your size, fewer or smaller seeds. So the flower is the fun part for an annual flowering plant. Each year flowering annuals look forward to producing flowers much more than to making seeds.

Seed-making follows the flower. Seeds occur as physical life and vitality is slipping away. However compared to the advent of a blossom, seeds are more like a useful after-thought, clearly not the annual high point event in the life and death of an annual plant. Flowers is what plants do at their peak of vitality.

Now contrast this with what conventional 1800s, Sherlock Holmes science tells school children. The purpose of plants is to make…