Dr. David George Haskell – November 2026

7:00 pm, Tuesday November 10, 2026
The Liederkranz Club, 6 East 87th Street, New York City
Free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 pm.

Click here to register for in-person attendance. Please register at least a day before the event.

The Liederkranz Club opens for socializing at 6:30 pm, with a beer, wine and beverage cash bar.

Disability access to the Liederkranz Club: see below*

You can also attend online via Zoom. Click here to register for the Zoom webinar.

How Flowers Made Our World

Flowers are not just pretty, they’re also world-changers. When flowers appeared on Planet Earth, nothing was ever again the same. Flowering plants built and now animate vital habitats such as rainforests, prairies, deciduous forests, and coastal vegetation such as salt marshes. These transformations came about through flowers’ cooperative relationships with insects, birds, and other animals, alongside reinvention of botanical motherhood through fruits and food stores in seeds. Flowers also possess radical genetic flexibility, allowing them to turn past environmental upheavals into opportunities for renewal. Flowers catalyzed human evolution, too, and we now depend on them for food and a healthy planet. Can we now extend this ancient symbiosis into a more vital and diverse future?

David George Haskell’s latest book, How Flowers Made Our World, explores the creative powers of flowering plants, including their catalytic effects on animal evolution. His books The Forest Unseen and Sounds and Wild and Broken were both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. He received the John Burroughs Medal for The Songs of Trees. He is also recipient of an Award in Literature from American Academy of Arts and Letters. Haskell is a Fellow of the Linnaean Society of London, Guggenheim Fellow, and Adjunct Professor of Environmental Sciences at Emory University. He cultivates plants and seeks birds at his home in Atlanta, GA. Find more at dghaskell.com.

*Access: The Liederkranz Club has an elevator, but the building is accessed by stairs from the street. If you call (212) 534-0880 the day before your visit, the Club can make an elevator available via a walkway on the building’s east side. However, the bathrooms are accessed by three steps.