Flowers free from the environment?

At the jubilee of Professor Lam it seems suitable to contribute a paper on the flower as a functional unit, though it is in the form of a kind of book-review. Lam himself wrote on the more fundamental connections between flowering and lower plants and on the basal morphological elements of the flower. He gave general schemes for relations among the flowering plants, in which he aimed at a synthesis between materialism and metaphysics, micro-evolution and macro-evolution, autonomous orthogenesis and selectivistic adaptation.