The Ancestor of All Flowers - Amborella trichopoda. Cameo by Jurassic Fern Dungeon.

It's astonishing how unnoticeable this plant - arguably one of the most famous plants in botany textbooks all over the world - would be to anybody walking through the slopes of this humid forest filled with tree ferns at 500 m (1640") elevation. Yet this species is considered to be the most ancient flowering plant lineage in existence, a lineage that stretches back 130 million years. Plants are dioecious (male or female) and their flowers are axillary and small - just a modest perianth; some bracts and anthers if male and, if female, 5 carpels and a few staminodes.

The population of plants I saw nested on the slopes of this little ravine was almost entirely female (supposedly they flower in March but in New Caledonia, since it never seems get too cold, many plants don't seem to adhere to any strict phenology, seeming instead to just flower whenever temperatures and precipitation allow). The plants occurred in the shady understory, their leaves speckled with #Cephaleuros algae. I saw a flying fox dip out from high up in the canopy of a large tree while the rain drizzled down around me. The tree ferns next to me were easily 70 feet tall. The forest floor was a thick carpet of duff and old fern fronds.

It was subtly comforting to be staring at this plant, a link to the past and to the emergence of what came to be the dominant photosynthetic life form on Earth's landmasses - the Angiosperms. A modern descendant of the oldest flowering plant that stood as a window looking in to the past 130 million years of plant evolution (and of the past 130 million years of evolution of all life on Earth, really) was growing here right next to me, dotting the slopes of this forest so inconspicuously. Without any context for it, it would've been easy to walk right by without even noticing. But its place in the history of life on Earth is paramount. Flowering plants are the foundation of human civilization and the entire base of Earth's food chain. Without them, none of us would be here. Had they not evolved, and conifers, cycads and ferns still been the dominant photosynthesizers, Earth today would look drastically different. Yet here we are, and on those forested slopes in the shady understory on the island of New Caledonia is #Amborella trichopoda.

Species list for this episode :

Angiopteris evecta (Marattiaceae)
Ptisana attenuata (Marattiaceae)
Hoya nicholsoniae (Apocynaceae)
Geodorum densiflorum (Orchidaceae)
Cyathea intermedia (Cyatheaceae)
Amborella trichopoda (Amborellaceae)

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