The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

by Michael Pollan

Of the man lounging in the two-hulled canoe, Robert Price, his biographer, wrote that he “had the thick bark of queerness on him.”

The vegetable kingdom’s lack of glamour by comparison (whoever heard of a forbidden vegetable?) can be laid to the fact that a vegetable’s reproductive strategy doesn’t turn on turning animals on.

Even the most God-fearing Puritan could persuade himself that cider had been given a theological free pass.

The original Golden Delicious stood until the 1950s on a hillside in Clay County, West Virginia, where it lived out its golden years inside a padlocked steel cage wired with a burglar alarm.

Psychiatrists regard a patient’s indifference to flowers as a symptom of clinical depression.

Mountains were ugly until just a few centuries ago (“warts on the earth,” Donne had called them, in an echo of the general consensus); forests were the “hideous” haunts of Satan until the Romantics rehabilitated them.

“the buttock of the world.”