Friday 4th April 2025

On another beautifully sunny day, with a chill wind, we returned to our geological timeline to look at how flowering plants or angiosperms evolved.  The children did remember that it was something to do with the mass extinction during the Cretaceous period which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago! When I asked why flowers began to grow, they knew it was to do with the climate suddenly warming up.  This led to us talking about how we know about the first flowers and fossils and all of them knew that flowers are very delicate and might not leave much of an impression. The children were given a selection of flowers and I brought in some larger shrubs and I asked them what they had in common.  There were: lesser celandine, lungwort, a dandelion, a daffodil, a hyacinth, flowering currant, forsythia and magnolia.  This got them talking about colours and scents(for some of them).  They knew that some had their seed blown, whilst some had their seed spread by birds.  All of them knew that they were pollinated. They even spoke about flowers they thought were wild and those that had been planted.  When I asked them to spot the odd ones out-they got one of them-(the daffodil is of course a bulb), which is where it stores all the energy and information for the following year. The hyacinth was the other bulb. Again, they were spot on with explaining why flowers were coloured and sometimes smelt good-to attract pollinators.  But, we were all surprised to discover that the first flowers 65 million years ago were all a very pale yellow and the reason was because the only pollinators back then were flies and beetles-bees, butterflies and moths had not evolved yet!  The eyes of flies and beetles are different and do not detect colour in  the same way.  The most surprising discovery was that the first flower that all future flowers evolved from was a yellow magnolia.  Hence, me bringing one in from  home!  We finally discussed how important our native wild flowers are and we will return to this next week to find out what celandine means and  why lungwort is so-called.  We finished by looking at our first native shrub to bloom at the end of March-Blackthorn.  Some of them had seen it later in the year when it has sloe berries and were even able to observe that it grows amongst the brambles and is in fact related to blackberries. As with so many of our native plants, it is associated with magic and witchcraft.  The wood from the tree was supposed to be used by witches to make their brooms and wands. We did have a game to play with the timeline, which we will have to resume next time, as the wind and the lunchtime whistle cut their attempts short.