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

by Michael Pollan

What the Dutch could not have known was that a virus was responsible for the magic of the broken tulip, a fact that, as soon as it was discovered, doomed the beauty it had made possible. 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.

These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based “flying ointment” that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the “broomstick” by which these women were said to travel.

Growth rates and yields made large strides through the 1980s as growers discovered they could speed photosynthesis by supplying plants with all the nutrients, carbon dioxide, and light they could handle—vast amounts, as it turned out. (Cannabis is, after all, a weed.) Gardeners found that their plants could absorb hundreds of thousands of lumens—a blinding amount of light—twenty-four hours a day. Later on, by abruptly slashing their diet of light to twelve hours daily (and changing from metal halide to sodium lights, the frequency of which more closely mimics the autumn sun), growers could shock their plants into flowering before they were eight weeks old.

In fact, the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t even officially regard the NewLeaf as a food. What? It seems that since the potato contains Bt, it is, at least in the eyes of the federal government, not a food at all but a pesticide, putting it under the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency.