UP FRONT 



Say It with Flowers 



Nature has been perfecting the sensual attractions of flow- 

 ers tor millions ot years. Yet what blossoms so poignant- 

 ly express to us is not longevity, but transience: enjoy 

 them today, for tomorrow their petals will litter the ground. How 

 apt that June, a season silly with flowers, is the month traditionally 

 chosen for some of life's happiest milestones — the graduations, the 

 weddings, days some of us plan for years. Savor the moment, say 

 the flowers of June. This year our daughter Julia is a June gradu- 

 ate, and my wife and I will be among the beaming parents. It 

 wouldn't surprise me if Julia made her appearance in robe and 

 mortarboard with a rose tucked rakishly in her hair. 



There is another response to floral profusion — equally valid, 

 and felt with equal passion — which Amy Litt articulates in her 

 cover story, "Origins of Floral Diversity" (page 34). "Most people 

 are content to take pleasure in the sheer abundance and variety" 

 of flowers, she writes. "We evolutionary botanists are less easily 

 gratified." And when you think about it, the cultural tradition that 

 says blossoms are ephemeral gets at only part of the truth about 

 nature's floral extravagance. Biologically, there's nothing ephemer- 

 al about it. Millions of years of evolutionary warfare have led to 

 highly efficient devices coldly calibrated to get the mobile pollina- 

 tors of the world to propagate the rooted species. And — fair 

 warning — Litt has not shrunk from describing the genetic jigsaw 

 puzzle that underlies the astonishing diversity of floral forms. 



• • • 



Jane Jacobs, the critic and tireless advocate for the benefits of 

 urban life on a human scale, died this past April. With her in 

 mind, here's another puzzle posed by a story in this issue, for 

 anyone fascinated by the idea of a city. What "city" never really 

 became a city? Where did people live together at high densities 

 for more than a thousand years without forming a centralized 

 community structure? The answers to those questions are coming 

 into focus at an archaeological site in central Turkey known as 

 (^atalhoyiik (see Ian Hodder, "This Old House," page 42). 



High-density living in (^atalhoyiik seems to have been a stew 

 of unimaginable pungency. Families built their houses cheek by 

 jowl, on top of the homes of their ancestors. They buried their 

 tic ail under raised platforms in their main living quarters, and 

 tossed garbage and human waste in the gap between their own 

 outside w alls and those of their neighbors. No wonder, as Hod- 

 der notes, they reached their rooms by climbing over their neigh- 

 bors' roofs and down a flight of stairs! Yet despite the high densi- 

 ty, few signs of any common area, village government, or even 

 shared production of goods were part of life in Catalhoyiik. 



The excavation of ( Catalhoyiik has been going on, in fits ami 

 starts, tor more than forty years, yet archaeologists have, almost 

 literally, only scratched the surface of what it has to say about the 

 varieties of the human condition. 



— Pi i ER Biu )WN 



mm 



Peter Brown Editor-in-Chief 



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NATURAL IMS I DRY June 2006 



