Why are there so many different organisms on land? To answer this fundamental question about the origins of life in terrestrial ecosystems, our laboratory is conducting comprehensive interspecies comparative analyses focusing on plant groups thought to have diversified in the Japanese archipelago. Our laboratory is located at the Tsukuba Botanical Garden of the National Museum of Nature and Science, which has the largest collection of wild plant species in Japan. This allows us to continuously observe and study a wide variety of wild plant species in their natural state, a significant advantage. We emphasize a cycle of deepening natural history discoveries obtained through field surveys, genetic, chemical, and morphological analyses in the laboratory, and feeding the results back into the field. Current representative research themes include the evolution of plant speciation through floral scent evolution and the evolution of flowers that mimic carrion, fermented substances, and mushrooms to deceive pollinators (floral mimicry).