Johnny-come-latelies

At the Times, David Colman interviews Oliver Sacks, who is wearing a particularly delightful T-shirt in the picture that accompanies the article:

“I love dense things,” he said cheerfully, ticking off the densities of tungsten, iridium and platinum.

He also loves ferns and cycads, believing that plants that make a garish show of their sex organs — what we call flowers — are perhaps a bit vulgar. “I feel that flowers are Johnny-come-latelies,” he said, noting that ferns predated flowering plants by more than 200 million years.