Vox – “…I saw a new study, published in the journal New Phytologist, about the beautiful, ordinary, and profound things flowers do after suffering an injury. That is: When many flower species get knocked down, they right themselves. The individual flowers on the stalk will rotate back, as best they can, into a position ideal for pollination. Like me watching my little roots growing at home, the scientists here made a small — and, one might say, obvious — observation. The difference, though, is that this paper is perhaps the first time this has been documented in the scientific literature, the result of a decade of work. “Plants just stay their entire life in one space and have to survive from there,” Lopresti says. That’s not so different from many of us right now. The paper is also a window into the balancing act of evolution. It’s reassuring to read it now, in springtime, as flowers are blooming and many of us feel like we are not. Look at blossoms, which may seem frail at first glance, and discover resilience. It’s not often I find the text of an academic article to be riveting and even beautiful. Here, I was hooked: “Virtually no research has addressed response to accidents involving flowers,” ecologists Scott Armbruster and Nathan Muchhala write. “Yet flowering stalks are often subject to accidental collapse, as when a scape blows down in the wind or coarse litter falls onto a stem …” Great Darwin’s ghost! This is a scientific oversight. Armbruster and Muchhala wanted to know what happens when a flower is put in peril. Their research here also speaks to the message: Life yearns for more…”