The Flowers in His Pocket

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The Flowers in His Pocket: “Time Machine” and Histories of Flowers

Wendy Cheng October 22, 2017 For M.A. Seminar with Sarah Cole at Columbia University

Flowers play a most mysterious role in H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine.” They are described in more general terms than just about anything else in the book, and yet their appearances structure the time travel exploration in unmistakable “plot points” from beginning to end. Rhododendrons and “mauve and purple blossoms dropping in a shower under the beating of hailstones” (Wells 25) are the first thing the Time Traveler sees when he arrives in the future world. Garlands of flowers are brought in greeting by the Eloi and more significantly by Weena after he saves her from drowning in a stream, marking the beginning of the central relationship. The Time Traveler later discovers “two withered flowers” like “white mallows” (Wells 59) in his pocket, gifts picked for him by Weena during their arduous journey toward the Palace of Green Porcelain. By the end of the book, these flowers emerge as the only evidence he possesses, and can share, of the future world. In Wells’ epilogue, he claims that they represent “gratitude” and a “mutual tenderness,” and one gets the sense that he attributes these values to the overall meaning of the book. Yet what kind of “gratitude” is being described, and what kind of “meaning” does the novel really impart in its entirety? While the flowers remind us of the altruistic exchange between Weena and the Time Traveler – her sacrificing her life to retrieve his time machine in return for his having saved her own life – their romance and relationship play only a slight, peripheral role to the solitary experience of the Time Traveler and his accumulation of intellectual knowledge. I argue that in examining a few histories of flowers – mainly, that of the evolution of flowers in context of the overall evolution of plants, and that of Victorian botanical innovations like the “Wardian Case” – we can clearly understand the ”gratitude” these flowers represent in Wells as being not a humanist (nor romantic) one, but a post-humanist, post- religious and post-national one. One must consider the view afforded by the end of the book as highlighting mutual dependence and interactions as forms of “altruism,” or “romance” that have occurred for over more than a hundred million years between angiosperms, or flowering plants, as well as their lichen ancestors – and all other living things on the planet. In giving flowers center stage, Wells challenges us to give angiosperms their due.

Flowering plants played a major role in what defined Charles Darwin as an evolutionary theorist specifically because they were an obstacle to his advancements. Darwin was famously confounded by the suddenness with which angiosperms burst onto the scene during the history of evolution, about one hundred and fifty million years ago. “Darwin long pondered the origin and rapid diversification of flowering plants, describing them as an ‘abominable mystery.’ In comparison with gymnosperms, which possess rather rudimentary male and female cones (like the pine cone), flowering plants present several innovations: the flower contains the male organs (stamens) and the female organs (pistil), surrounded by petals and sepals, while the ovules, instead of being naked, are protected within the pistil. How was nature able to invent the flower, a structure so different from that of cones?” (“Where Do Flowers Come From?”).

Angiosperms, or flowering plants – with flowers being the plants’ sexual organs- were an advancement on gymnosperms, or plants with cones. The innovation of flowers enabled angiosperms to become the most successful of all plants in their self-proliferation and diversification, as they used the mobility of other living things – insects and animals – to spread their genes all over the earth and allow for genetic mutation. Today there are about 300,000 species of flowering plants – a mere 300,000 to my mind, as that means grouping Americans alone into clusters of roughly 1000 people each would allow us to represent every kind of flower that exists. And angiosperms now make up eighty percent of all living plants on earth. As the major source of food for all living things – they are our plums, our squash, our peas and potatoes – flowering plants could easily be said to have had a reciprocal life of “mutual tenderness” with humans, animals and insects.

While some people think of Darwin as being confounded by the “how” of gymnosperms leading to angiosperms – an issue that some scientists have recently theorized as having been solved by the discovery of a “common ancestor” called the Welwitschia, a plant with cones that include male organs and a kind of vestigial, non-functioning female organ (“Where Do Flowers Come From?”) – Darwin’s “Abominable Mystery” is actually far more central to his prominence as an evolutionary theorist than that – and for the same reasons that they could be seen as central to Wells’ book. Darwin defined himself against the prevailing evolution theories of the later 19th century by suggesting a gradual sense of evolution; he believed that “nature does not take a leap.” The previous theorists had subscribed to “saltational” speciation, “also known as abrupt speciation” or “the discontinuity in a lineage that occurs through genetic mutations, chromosomal aberrations or other evolutionary mechanisms that cause reproductively isolated individuals to establish a new species population” (Friedman). In other words, flowers were the one thing that became an obstacle to Darwin’s advancement in evolution – as well as to our generally accepted contemporary belief in the gradual effect of genetic mutation. This infers that one can see the sudden emergence of flowers as representing something post-religiously and provisionally “divine,” or outside of the realm of trends proven by science.

Wells often refers to flowers as simply “flowers” – rhododendrons are the only specific kind of flower he ever names in the book, and this clearly contrasts with the specificity with which he describes, for example, the German influence on Greek writing as affecting a person’s success in absorbing the classics via time travel. This simplification of flowers as a subject recalls the way that divinity is usually represented without nomenclature. And there is something about the way flowers represent what is “good evolution” in the future world, as well as the “goodwill and gratitude” that occur between two races – the human and Eloi – that gives flowers a provisionally “divine” function in the book. Indeed, flowers could be seen as a non-Godlike God, and this is clarified by both their similarity and contrast to lichens, which are the only living things that the Time Traveler witnesses in the farthest future he has visited by the end of the book. When looking at the history of lichens, we can see how that future world devoid of animals, human-like creatures, flowers or trees simultaneously represents a farthest past. Lichens could be the oldest living organisms, and as carbon sinks, they played a large role in balancing carbon dioxide and oxygen in a way that allowed earth to be habitable for humans and other living things (Hedges, Kennedy). Wells’ farthest future does not portray the doom of a world where human-like creatures can never exist again, so much as it represents our defeat by an organism that never needed us, especially not as much as flowers did. One could see lichens as representing a kind of unknowable and disinterested God, the kind of God that people feared precisely when Humanism became prevalent. Flowers, instead, can represent a post-humanist, post-religious collaborator, one that allows us to invest our energies in a symbiotic rather than Baconian subjugating style.

In briefly looking at a Victorian botanical innovation, we can more easily understand flowers as expressing a post-national “gratitude” or “mutual tenderness.” Richard Mabey, in his “Cabaret of Plants,” describes the development of the Wardian Case, the prototype of what would later develop into the first “botanical theatres, the nineteenth century’s glass arks” (Mabey 253). A doctor initially concerned about the effect of industry on his patients’ health, Ward later became personally frustrated with being unable to grow his ferns in the toxic atmosphere of East End, London. He began to grow them in sealed glass jars on his window ledge, following Joseph Priestley’s first discoveries that “plants enclosed in airtight glass cases are self-sustaining” (254). After Ward succeeded in using sealed glass jars to raise thirty different species in three years, he began to develop glass cases that would soon be used to ship plants between far distances; the first went from London to the Antipodes. His Wardian cases would be mass produced and by the 1840’s, were used to transport 20,000 tea plants from Shanghai to the Himalayas for the East Indian Company (Mabey 256). This meant that by Wells’ time, “suburban hothouses” full of “exotic vegetation” would be accessible to any householder. And the grandest of all at Chatsworth, the Duke of Devonshire’s seat in Derbyshire was probably an elite version of what Wells’ father had access to as a gardener, though it gives us some perspective on the possibilities: “There were massive, exotic foliage plants and ferns brought from the jungles and mountains of distant continents, orange trees brought from Malta, altingias and araucarias, date palms from the Tankerville collection, the feathery cocoa palm and the giant palms…hibiscus, bougainvillea… cassias, cinnamon trees… the bird of paradise flower…” (257).

One can easily imagine how the availability of “exotic” plants as seen specifically through varying forms of “glass cases,” and for the first time in one’s history, could inspire a person to seek a deeper and more organic connection to other peoples. The Eloi as a race immediately bring to mind Tibetans with their monks’ robes and large communal temples. It is no accident that rhododendrons come from Southeast Asia and are more abundant in Tibet than anywhere else in the world. And by indulging in an imagined world full of garlands of flowers, Wells expresses a wish to go beyond the glass case and experience a tradition aligned with that of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Indians and indigenous cultures all over the world.

If taken primarily from the perspective of an environmental gratitude, one finds Wells advocating an attitude for humanity that is neither sentimental nor without heart. Flowers, ironically, symbolize what is romantic and ideal, and yet our relationship with them has been one where we have merely benefitted each other in ways that are both necessary and pleasant. It is perhaps similar to the ways in which a gardener might interact with a garden he prefers, or the caretaker of a house with a house that she admires. It is similar, too, to how a gardener might offer to marry a girl specifically after her mother has died, as in the case of Wells’ parents. It might be the kindest sort of interaction that we can ever really ask for, the sort that we enjoy but that also saves our lives. Perhaps Wells is saying that for us to have that relationship with the environment, we must first understand that that is exactly what it’s like.

Works Cited

“Angiosperm,” Encyclopedia Britannica.

https://www.britannica.com/plant/angiosperm/Significance-to-humans

Belyeu, Samantha. “Why are Flowering Plants Important to the Earth and Humans?” Sciencing. April 24, 2017 https://sciencing.com/flowering-plants-important-earth-humans-6628704.html

“Where Do Flowers Come From? Shedding Light on Darwin’s ‘Abominable Mystery’.” Phys.org, Feb 17, 2017 https://phys.org/news/2017-02-darwin-abominable-mystery.html

Friedman, W.E. “The Meaning of Darwin’s ‘Abominable Mystery’.” Pubmed.gov, 2008 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21628174

Hedges, Blair and Kennedy, Barbara K. “First Land Plants and Fungi Changed Earth’s Climate, Paving the Way for Explosive Evolution of Land Animals, New Gene Study Suggests.” Penn State Science. http://science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2001-news/Hedges8-2001.htm

Mabey, Richard. “The Cabaret of Plants.” W.W. Norton, 2016, New York, NY.
“Origin of Flowers Have Been Discovered.” IFL Science. http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-

animals/origin-flowers-has-been-discovered/

“Rhododendron,” The Flower Expert. https://www.theflowerexpert.com/content/mostpopularflowers/morepopularflowers/rhododendron

Wells, H.G. “Time Machine.” Penguin Classics, 2005, London, England.