Photo: IICG image bank
Text: Marcos Méndez
Flowers are loaded with symbolism, such as love, beauty, youth, or… the ephemeral nature of it all. Who hasn’t been moved by each petal that the magic rose from Beauty and the Beast inexorably lost? Indeed, from a more materialistic perspective, a large sector of the flower industry strives to maintain the life of flowers, both in potted plants and cut flowers, as long as possible. And from a more ecological and evolutionary perspective, it’s known to be a losing battle, since keeping a flower open not only entails benefits (economic for the industry, biological efficiency for the flower) but also costs, related to water and energy consumption. From the perspective of evolutionary ecology, it has been known since the mid-1990s that each plant species has a flower life span that is the product of a balance between the speed with which it exports and receives pollen, on the one hand, and the costs of keeping the flower open.
Recently, there have been attempts to identify strategies for flower duration. It has been proposed that there are expensive and cheap flowers, and short-lived and long-lived flowers. While it is easy to imagine that expensive flowers will be short-lived and the opposite will be true for cheap flowers, it is less clear whether there are expensive and long-lived flowers, or cheap and short-lived flowers. The problem is that there is no agreement on how to determine what is “expensive” or “cheap,” nor on how to take into account benefits, and not just costs, in this identification of strategies.
To advance this definition of a “flower economic spectrum,” inspired by similar ideas for leaf duration, a workshop funded by the Global Change Research Institute was organized in September at the Rey Juan Carlos University. The idea was promoted by Marcos Méndez, a professor of ecology with expertise in evolutionary ecology. The participants were Adam Roddy and Mario Paiva of New York University, who are working on the costs of producing and keeping flowers open; Rachel Spigler of Temple University and Jakub (Kuba) Stenc of Charles University in Prague, who measured how pollen accumulation varies with flower open time; Lars Götzenberger of Charles University in Prague, who worked on the economic spectrum of leaves; and Kevin Sartori of Uppsala University, who studies the genetic basis underlying flower duration.
During three intense days of work and brainstorming, key variables that could allow for integrating the costs of maintaining open flowers with the benefits of pollen receptionwere identified. A research framework was also developed that will allow for a first outline of the economic spectrum of flowers. The integration of complementary perspectives was key to the success of this workshop, and a collaboration was consolidated that will surely produce a novel perspective on the lifespan of flowers.
Floral Longevity and Resource Economy: Towards a Stronger Link with the Floral Economic Spectrum (FLARE) Workshop, the event held from September 8th to 12th, 2025, at the Móstoles Campus of the Rey Juan Carlos University. Funded by the 2nd Forward Thinking Actions call of the Institute for Research on Global Change (IICG-URJC), it brought together internationally renowned experts with the aim of delving deeper into floral longevity and resource economy towards a stronger link with the floral economic spectrum.