Kalyani Tupkary

Time isn’t like the other senses, Eagleman says. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing are relatively easy to isolate in the brain. They have discrete functions that rarely overlap: it’s hard to describe the taste of a sound, the color of a smell, or the scent of a feeling. … But a sense of time is threaded through everything we perceive. 

While historical texts have long been subject to critical analysis, the formal and historical problems posed by graphic representations of time have largely been ignored. This is no small matter: graphic representation is among our most important tools for organizing information.*

Like so many botanical concepts, the flower clock originated with the Swedish ur-taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, in his 1751 treatise “Philosophia Botanica.” Based on field observations, he divided flowers into three categories. The meteorici open and close with the weather. The tropici follow the changing hours of daylight. And the aequinoctales,

Put another way, who stands outside for hours, gazing at a starflower instead of a Samsung Galaxy? When you’re stalking a hawkweed at daybreak, time is an afterthought.