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This December the lilies have begun to bloom in the gardens of the Pedralbes monastery in Barcelona, ??where I have captured these photographs for La Vanguardia’s Readers’ Photos.
It occurred to me to wet them so that their petals would be full of water drops, since, according to researchers, rain has come to shape the flowers.
The humble raindrop may have played an important role in the evolution of flowers, scientists at Wuhan University in China found after conducting a study of 80 species.
Botanists Yun-Yun Mao and Shuang-Quan Huang found that flowers evolve different shapes and structures, in part to prevent pollen from getting wet, while other flowers solve the problem by producing waterproof pollen.
In reality, this observation made in the Wuhan Botanical Garden corroborated that Charles Darwin, the father of the Theory of Evolution, was right when he maintained that flowers had evolved according to the climate and that their shape is directly influenced by climatic factors.
The flowers are protected or, rather, the pollen, which is essential in the reproduction of plants. These grains, more or less microscopic, need the wind to travel the sky in search of flowers to fertilize. But if it gets wet, the pollen can lose volatility, preventing the plant from reproducing.
The conclusion reached by Chinese botanists is that for this reason flowers mold their shape, trying to ensure that their pollen is not spoiled by raindrops.
