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

by Michael Pollan

After ten thousand years of coevolution, their genes are rich archives of cultural as well as natural information. The DNA of that tulip there, the ivory one with the petals attenuated like sabers, contains detailed instructions on how best to catch the eye not of a bee but of an Ottoman Turk; it has something to tell us about that age’s idea of beauty.

The four desires I explore here are sweetness, broadly defined, in the story of the apple; beauty in the tulip’s; intoxication in the story of cannabis; and control in the story of the potato

it was the flower that first ushered the idea of beauty into the world the moment, long ago, when floral attraction emerged as an evolutionary strategy.

The same great existential fact of plant life explains why plants make chemicals to both repel and attract other species: immobility.

This was the evolutionary watershed associated with the advent of the angiosperms, an extraordinary new class of plants that made showy flowers and formed large seeds that other species were induced to disseminate. Plants began evolving burrs that attach to animal fur like Velcro, flowers that seduce honeybees in order to powder their thighs with pollen, and acorns that squirrels obligingly taxi from one forest to another, bury, and then, just often enough, forget to eat.

Nature’s success stories from now on are probably going to look a lot more like the apple’s than the panda’s or white leopard’s. If those last two species have a future, it will be because of human desire; strangely enough, their survival now depends on what amounts to a form of artificial selection. This is the world in which we, along with Earth’s other creatures, now must make our uncharted way.

An orchard is also an idealized or domesticated version of a forest, and the transformation of a shadowy tract of wilderness into a tidy geometry of apple trees offered a visible, even stirring, proof that a pioneer had mastered the primordial forest. Compared to the awesome majesty of the old-growth trees the early settlers encountered, the modesty of an apple tree, the way it obligingly takes on the forms we give it, holding out its fruit and flowers so near to hand, must have been a tremendous comfort on the frontier.

It is much harder for us to imagine living without the experience of sweetness, however, and sweetness, in the widest, oldest sense, is what the apple offered an American in Chapman’s time, the desire it helped gratify. Sugar was a rarity in eighteenth-century America.

To call land “sweet” was a way of saying it answered our desires.

Allowed to ferment for a few weeks, pressed apple juice yields a mildly alcoholic beverage with about half the strength of wine. For something stronger, the cider can then be distilled into brandy or simply frozen; the intensely alcoholic liquid that refuses to ice is called applejack. Hard cider frozen to thirty degrees below zero yields an applejack of 66 proof.

His kindness to animals was notorious, an outrage to frontier custom.

His America ordered itself around those veiny lines the way ours does around highways. On them you could travel from the spot where Bill and I were starting out all the way to Pittsburgh or to the Mississippi, depending on which way you turned at Marietta.

The water, moving with surprising dispatch for the time of year, looked like a freshly blacktopped road, except where snags flustered its surface, causing it to sparkle.

Chapman’s ability to freely cross borders that other people believed to be fixed and unbreachable—between the red world and the white, between wilderness and civilization, even between this world and the next—was one of the hallmarks of his character and probably the thing that most confounded people about the man, both then and now.

Johnny Appleseed was very much an American Dionysus—innocent and mild. In this he may have helped establish the benign, see-no-evil mood that characterizes the Dionysian strain in American culture, from transcendentalist Concord to the Summer of Love.

went on beneath the notice of the settlers themselves, who brought along weed seeds in the cracks of their boot soles, grass seeds in the feed bags of their horses, and microbes in their blood and gut. (None of these introductions passed beneath the notice of the Native Americans, however.)

I found apples that tasted like bananas, others like pears. Spicy apples and sticky-sweet ones, apples sprightly as lemons and others rich as nuts. I picked apples that weighed more than a pound, others compact enough to fit in a child’s pocket. Here were yellow apples, green apples, spotted apples, russet apples, striped apples, purple apples, even a near-blue apple. There were apples that looked prepolished and apples that wore a dusty bloom on their cheeks.

In the wild a plant and its pests are continually coevolving, in a dance of resistance and conquest that can have no ultimate victor. But coevolution ceases in an orchard of grafted trees, since they are genetically identical from generation to generation. The problem very simply is that the apple trees no longer reproduce sexually, as they do when they’re grown from seed, and sex is nature’s way of creating fresh genetic combinations. At

This world-historical consensus about the beauty of flowers, which seems so right and uncontroversial to us, is remarkable when you consider that there are relatively few things in nature whose beauty people haven’t had to invent. Sunrise, the plumage of birds, the human face and form, and flowers: there may be a few more, but not many. 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. Flowers have had their poets too, but they never needed them in quite the same way. According to Jack Goody, an English anthropologist who has studied the role of flowers in most of the world’s cultures—East and West, past and present—the love of flowers is almost, but not quite, universal.

Beauty in nature often shows up in the vicinity of sex—think of the plumage of birds or mating rituals throughout the animal kingdom. “Sexual selection”—that is, evolution’s favoring of features that increase a plant’s or animal’s attractiveness and therefore its reproductive success—is the best explanation we have for the otherwise senseless extravagance of feathers and flowers, maybe also sports cars and bikinis.

Of course, their willingness to take part in the moving game of human culture has proven a brilliant strategy for their success, for there are a lot more roses and tulips around today, in a lot more places, than there were before people took an interest in them. For a flower the path to world domination passes through humanity’s ever-shifting ideals of beauty.

the best way for a tulip to get ahead was to have absurdly long petals drawn to a point fine as a needle. In drawings, paintings, and ceramics (the only place the Turks’ ideal of tulip beauty survives; the human environment is an unstable one), these elongated blooms look as though they’d been stretched to the limit by a glassblower. The metaphor of choice for this form of tulip petal was the dagger.

One crucial element of the beauty of the tulip that intoxicated the Dutch, the Turks, the French, and the English has been lost to us. To them the tulip was a magic flower because it was prone to spontaneous and brilliant eruptions of color. In a planting of a hundred tulips, one of them might be so possessed, opening to reveal the white or yellow ground of its petals painted, as if by the finest brush and steadiest hand, with intricate feathers or flames of a vividly contrasting hue. When this happened, the tulip was said to have “broken,” and if a tulip broke in a particularly striking manner—if the flames of the applied color reached clear to the petal’s lip, say, and its pigment was brilliant and pure and its pattern symmetrical—the owner of that bulb had won the lottery. For the offsets of that bulb would inherit its pattern and hues and command a fantastic price. The fact that broken tulips for some unknown reason produced fewer and smaller offsets than ordinary tulips drove their prices still higher. Semper Augustus was the most famous such break.

The color of a tulip actually consists of two pigments working in concert—a base color that is always yellow or white and a second, laid-on color called an anthocyanin; the mix of these two hues determines the unitary color we see. The virus works by partially and irregularly suppressing the anthocyanin, thereby allowing a portion of the underlying color to show through.

than the one I saw on Fifth Avenue had helped fire

As with society, so with capitalism in the throes of a speculative mania: all of its values are turned on their head—thrift, patience, value for money, reward for effort.

For as long as the carnival of capitalism lasts, the rules of logic are repealed, or rather recast along new lines, ones that will appear absurd in the cold light of the morning after but that make impeccable sense within the fevered space of the speculative bubble.

That’s when the trade in actual bulbs gave way to the trade in promissory notes: slips of paper listing details of the flowers in question, the dates they would be delivered, and their price.

Suddenly the tulip trade was a year-round affair, and the connoisseurs and growers who shared a genuine interest in the flowers were joined by legions of newly minted “florists” who couldn’t have cared less.

The bubble logic driving tulipomania has since acquired a name: “the greater fool theory.”

So here is a third constituent of beauty to add to the desiderata offered to us by the flower: first came contrast, then pattern (or form), and finally variation.

Great art is born when Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy are held in balance, when our dreams of order and abandon come together.

Once upon a time, there were no flowers—two hundred million years ago, to be only slightly more precise.

Goats, who will try a little bit of anything, probably deserve credit for the discovery of coffee:

Pigeons spacing out on cannabis seeds (a favorite food of many birds) may have tipped off the ancient Chinese (or Aryans or Scythians) to that plant’s special properties.

At the top end of the market this has led to a connoisseurship of cannabis—not just of its taste or aroma, but of the specific psychological texture of its high. Some strains (typically those with a higher proportion of indica genes) are narcotic in their effects, tending to stupefy. Others (often the ones with more sativa genes) leave the mind clear and fluent and the body unimpaired. Some of the growers I met spoke in terms of “white-collar” and “blue-collar” pot. The strains I found personally sympathetic were stimulating and, evidently, conducive to mental speculation.

Allen Ginsberg suggested that the negative feelings marijuana sometimes provokes, such as anxiety, fear, and paranoia, are “traceable to the effects on consciousness not of the narcotic but of the law.”

When I asked Howlett what the purpose of such a network might be, she began her answer by listing some of the various direct and indirect effects of cannabinoids: pain relief, loss of short-term memory, sedation, and mild cognitive impairment.

Howlett speculated that the human cannabinoid system evolved to help us endure (and selectively forget) the routine slings and arrows of life “so that we can get up in the morning and do it all over again.” It is the brain’s own drug for coping with the human condition.

The purpose of THC could be to protect cannabis plants from ultraviolet radiation; it seems that the higher the altitude at which cannabis grows, the more THC it produces. THC also exhibits antibiotic properties, suggesting a role in protecting cannabis from disease.

This is no small thing. Indeed, I would venture that, more than any other single quality, it is the relentless moment-by-moment forgetting, this draining of the pool of sense impression almost as quickly as it fills, that gives the experience of consciousness under marijuana its peculiar texture. It helps account for the sharpening of sensory perceptions, for the aura of profundity in which cannabis bathes the most ordinary insights, and, perhaps most important of all, for the sense that time has slowed or even stopped. For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours. And the wonder of that experience, perhaps more than any other, seems to be at the very heart of the human desire to change consciousness, whether by means of drugs or any other technique.

The first part of Nietzsche’s essay is a moving and occasionally hilarious paean to the virtues of forgetting, which he maintains is a prerequisite to human happiness, mental health, and action. Without dismissing the value of memory or history, he argues (much like Emerson and Thoreau) that we spend altogether too much of our energy laboring in the shadows of the past—under the stultifying weight of convention, precedent, received wisdom, and neurosis.

I’m tempted to agree with Carl Sagan, who was convinced that marijuana’s morning-after problem is not a question of self-deception so much as a failure to communicate—to put “these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day.” We simply don’t have the words to convey the force of these perceptions to our straight selves, perhaps because they are the kinds of perceptions that precede words. They may well be banal, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t also at the same time profound.

It is by temporarily mislaying much of what we already know (or think we know) that cannabis restores a kind of innocence to our perceptions of the world, and innocence in adults will always flirt with embarrassment.

Hassan would begin his initiation of new recruits by giving them so much hashish that they passed out. Hours later the men would awaken to find themselves in the midst of a most beautiful palace garden, laid with sumptuous delicacies and staffed with gorgeous maidens to gratify their every desire. Scattered through this paradise, lying on the ground in pools of blood, are severed heads—actually actors buried to their necks. The heads speak, telling the men of the afterlife and what they will have to do if they hope ever to return to this paradise.

The tale became a staple of orientalism and, later, of the campaign to criminalize marijuana in America in the 1930s.

The challenge these plants posed to monotheism was profound, for they threatened to divert people’s gaze from the sky, where the new God resided, down to the natural world all around them. The magic plants were, and remain, a gravitational force pulling us back to Earth, to matter, away from the there and then of Christian salvation and back to the here and now.

The content of the knowledge Adam and Eve could gain by tasting of the fruit does not matter nearly as much as its form—that is, the very fact that there was spiritual knowledge of any kind to be had from a tree: from nature.

By “opening and using this product,” the card informed me, I was now “licensed” to grow these potatoes, but only for a single generation; the crop I would water and tend and harvest was mine, yet also not mine. That is, the potatoes I would dig come September would be mine to eat or sell, but their genes would remain the intellectual property of Monsanto, protected under several U.S. patents, including 5,196,525; 5,164,316; 5,322,938; and 5,352,605. Were I to save even one of these spuds to plant next year—something I’ve routinely done with my potatoes in the past—I would be breaking federal law. (I had to wonder, what would be the legal status of any “volunteers”—those plants that, with no prompting from the gardener, sprout each spring from tubers overlooked during the previous harvest?) The small print on the label also brought the disconcerting news that my potato plants were themselves registered as a pesticide with the Environmental Protection Administration (U.S. EPA Reg. No. 524-474).

Yet for reasons we don’t completely understand, distinct species do exist in nature, and they exhibit a certain genetic integrity—sex between them, when it does occur, doesn’t produce fertile offspring. Nature presumably has some reason for erecting these walls, even if they are permeable on occasion. Perhaps, as some biologists believe, the purpose of keeping species separate is to put barriers in the path of pathogens, to contain their damage so that a single germ can’t wipe out life on Earth at a stroke.