Botany of Desire

I've heard about the Botany of Desire for a while now. It was a best seller, but somehow it didn't really get my interest until I read a chapter of it in Sun Magazine. So when I found it cheap at Costco I took it for this trip.

I've only just begun it, but it's good on several counts. It's making me think about things from a totally new perspective and it's so well written that it zips right by.

So, this is for those of you who also never found your way to this book or never even heard about it.

Michael Pollan's premise, well he seems to have several. One is that we've taken a human-centric view of the evolution of plants that we've cultivated. Humans, from this perspective, have played with the plants for our benefit. In this book Pollan wants to look at four plants - apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes - from the plants' perspective.

These plants hit on a remarkably clever strategy: getting us to move and think for them. Now came edible grasses (such as wheat and corn) that incited humans to cut down vast forests to make more room for them; flowers whose beauty would transfix whole cultures; plants so compelling and useful and tasty that they would inspire human beings to seed, extol, and even write books about them.(pp. xx-xxi)

Pollan makes clear this wasn't done consciously.

In a coevolutionary bargain like the one struck by the bee and the apple tree, the two parties act on each other to advance their individual interests but wind up trading favors; food for the bee, transportation for the apple genes. Consciousness needn't enter into it on either side and the traditional distinction between subject and object is meaningless.(p. xiv)

Humans, he points out, weren't as in control as they think. This worked both ways. The oak, for example, did fine with the squirrel burying (and often forgetting) acorns, that it never had a need for humans.

So Pollan figures that we can learn about ourselves by studying four desires that the four plants exploited - sweetness (the apple), beauty (the tulip), intoxication (the marijuana), and control (the potato).

One thing we learn is that we tend to underestimate the characteristics of other species and overestimate our own.

Plants are so unlike people that it's very difficult for us to appreciate fully their complexity and sophistication. Yet plants have been evolving much, much longer than we have, have been inventing new strategies for survival and perfecting their designs for so long that to say the one of us is the more "advanced" really depends on how you define that term, on what "advances" you value. Naturally we value abilities such as consciousness, toolmaking, and language, if only because these have been the destinations of our own evolutionary journey thus far. Plants have traveled all that distance and then some - they've just traveled in a different direction.

Plants are nature's alchemists, expert at transforming water, soil, and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive, much less manufacture. While we were nailing down consciousness, and learning to walk on two feet, they were, by the same process of natural selection, inventing photosynthesis (the astonishing trick of converting sunlight into food) and perfecting organic chemistry. As it turns out, many of the plants' discoveries in chemistry and physics have served us well. From plants come chemical compounds that nourish and heal and poison and delight the senses, others that rouse and put to sleep and intoxicate, and a few with the astounding power to alter consciousness - even to plant dreams in the brains of awake animals.

I'm only into the first part on apples, but already he has burst a common myth for me - the story of Johnny Appleseed.

Actually, apples and the man [Johnny "Appleseed" Chapman] have suffered a similar fate in the years since they journeyed down the Ohio together in Chapman's double-hulled canoe. Both then had the tang of strangeness about them, and both have long since sweetened beyond recognition. Figures of tart wildness, both have been thoroughly domesticated - Chapman transformed into a benign Saint Francis of the American frontier, the apple into a blemish-free-plastic-red saccharine orb. "Sweetness without dimension" is how one pomologist memorably described the Red Delicious, the same might be said of the Johnny Appleseed promulgated by Walt Disney and several generations of American children's book writers. (p. 7)

It turns out that apple seeds do not replicate the fruit they come from. To do that you need to graft a slip of wood from a desirable tree onto the new tree. Apples from seeds tend to be sour enough

"to set a squirrel's teeth on edge and make a jay scream."(p. 9)

Therefore, the seeds that John Chapman took into the wilderness, were way too sour to eat. Instead, the reason settlers welcomed Chapman, according to Pollan, was that Appleseed's apples were essential for making apple cider about the only alcoholic beverage on the edge of frontier.

Since I've been talking about people's narratives about how the world works, this book naturally appeals to me because it too challenges long held narratives.

[Nov. 1 update: Click the link for the PBS site about the movie.]