It turns out that flowering plants did some extraordinary things once they evolved: they formed belowground links with nitrogen-fixing bacteria that essentially pumped lots of fertilizer into the soil, allowing ecosystems to become large and productive. Through their flowers and their fruit, they started to coevolve with insects, with beetles and moths and katydids and flies; and if you look at the evolutionary tree of most modern groups, and particularly the most diverse groups of insects today, they explode when flowering plants come along because of this reciprocal interaction between the insects and the plants themselves.

~ David G. Haskell

Lotus and Bees -photo by Angle DiBenedetto