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October 11 - October 23, 2021
the story of four familiar plants—the apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato—and the human desires that link their destinies to our own.
The four plants whose stories this book tells are what we call “domesticated species,” a rather one-sided term—that grammar again—that leaves the erroneous impression that we’re in charge. We automatically think of domestication as something we do to other species, but it makes just as much sense to think of it as something certain plants and animals have done to us, a clever evolutionary strategy for advancing their own interests. The species that have spent the last ten thousand or so years figuring out how best to feed, heal, clothe, intoxicate, and otherwise delight us have made themselves
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I call this book The Botany of Desire because it is as much about the human desires that connect us to these plants as it is about the plants themselves. My premise is that these human desires form a part of natural history in the same way the hummingbird’s love of red does, or the ant’s taste for the aphid’s honeydew. I think of them as the human equivalent of nectar. So while the book explores the social history of these plants, weaving them into our story, it is at the same time a natural history of the four human desires these plants evolved to stir and gratify.
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—specifically, in the story of a genetically altered potato I grew in my garden to see where the ancient arts of domestication may now be headed.
Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.
Our desires are simply more grist for evolution’s mill, no different from a change in the weather: a peril for some species, an opportunity for others. Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That’s why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees.
Darwin devoted the first chapter of The Origin of Species to a special case of natural selection called “artificial selection”—his term for the process by which domesticated species come into the world. Darwin was using the word artificial not as in fake but as in artifact: a thing reflecting human will.
Partly by default, partly by design, all of nature is now in the process of being domesticated—of coming, or finding itself, under the (somewhat leaky) roof of civilization. Indeed, even the wild now depends on civilization for its survival. 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.
nature is not only to be found “out there”; it is also “in here,” in the apple and the potato, in the garden and the kitchen, even in the brain of a man beholding the beauty of a tulip or inhaling the smoke from a burning cannabis flower. My wager is that when we can find nature in these sorts of places as readily as we now find it in the wild, we’ll have traveled a considerable distance toward understanding our place in the world in the fullness of its complexity and ambiguity.
Each of the chapters that follows takes the form of a journey that either starts out, stops by, or ends up in my garden but along the way ventures far afield, both in space and historical time: to seventeenth-century Amsterdam, where, for a brief, perverse moment, the tulip became more precious than gold; to a corporate campus in St. Louis, where genetic engineers are reinventing the potato; and back to Amsterdam, where another, far less lovely flower has made itself, again, more precious than gold. I also travel to potato farms in Idaho; follow my species’ passion for intoxicating plants down
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that we somehow stand outside, or apart from, nature. This book tells a different kind of story about Man and Nature, one that aims to put us back in the great reciprocal web that is life on Earth. My hope is that by the time you close its covers, things outside (and inside) will look a little different, so that when you see an apple tree across a road or a tulip across a table, it won’t appear quite so alien, so Other. Seeing these plants instead as willing partners in an intimate and reciprocal relationship with us means looking at ourselves a little differently, too: as the objects of other
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CHAPTER 1 Desire: Sweetness Plant: The Apple (MALUS DOMESTICA
1806—somewhere
John Chapman, already well known to people in Ohio by his nickname: Johnny Appleseed.
Apples were something people drank. The reason people in Brilliant wanted John Chapman to stay and plant a nursery was the same reason he would soon be welcome in every cabin in Ohio: Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier.
Exactly where the apple started out from has long been a matter of contention among people who have studied these things, but it appears that the ancestor of Malus domestica—the domesticated apple—is a wild apple that grows in the mountains of Kazakhstan.
He was selling, cheaply, something everybody wanted—something, in fact, everybody in Ohio needed by law. A land grant in the Northwest Territory specifically required a settler to “set out at least fifty apple or pear trees” as a condition of his deed.
Either way, sweetness has proved to be a force in evolution. By encasing their seeds in sugary and nutritious flesh, fruiting plants such as the apple hit on an ingenious way of exploiting the mammalian sweet tooth: in exchange for fructose, the animals provide the seeds with transportation, allowing the plant to expand its range. As parties to this grand coevolutionary bargain, animals with the strongest predilection for sweetness and plants offering the biggest, sweetest fruits prospered together and multiplied, evolving into the species we see, and are, today. As a precaution, the plants
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Eventually they would attack cider directly and launch their campaign to chop down apple trees, but up until the end of the nineteenth century cider continued to enjoy the theological exemption the Puritans had contrived for it.
Americans’ “inclination toward cider” is the only way to explain John Chapman’s success—how the man could have made a living selling spitters to Ohio settlers when there were already grafted trees bearing edible fruit for sale in Marietta.
the famous appleman/evangelist
By planting so many apples from seed, Americans like Chapman had, willy-nilly, conducted a vast evolutionary experiment, allowing the Old World apple to try out literally millions of new genetic combinations, and by doing so to adapt to the new environment in which the tree now found itself. Every time an apple failed to germinate or thrive in American soil, every time an American winter killed a tree or a freeze in May nipped its buds, an evolutionary vote was cast, and the apples that survived this great winnowing became ever so slightly more American.
Whenever a tree growing in the midst of a planting of nameless cider apples somehow distinguished itself—for the hardiness of its constitution, the redness of its skin, the excellence of its flavor—it would promptly be named, grafted, publicized, and multiplied. Through this simultaneous process of natural and cultural selection, the apples took up into themselves the very substance of America—its soil and climate and light, as well as the desires and tastes of its people, and even perhaps a few of the genes of America’s native crab apples. In time all these qualities became part and parcel of
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But how lucky for us that wildness survives in a seed and can be cultivated—can flourish even in the straight lines and right angles of an orchard. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Thoreau once wrote; a century later, when many of the wild places are no more, Wendell Berry has proposed this necessary corollary: “In human culture is the preservation of wildness.”
CHAPTER 2 Desire: Beauty Plant: The Tulip (TULIPA)
Never before or since has a flower—a flower!—taken a star turn on history’s main stage as it did in Holland between 1634 and 1637.
Semper Augustus was the intricately feathered red-and-white tulip one bulb of which changed hands for ten thousand guilders at the height of the mania, a sum that at the time would have bought one of the grandest canal houses in Amsterdam. Semper Augustus is gone from nature, though I have seen paintings of it (the Dutch would commission portraits
It is possible to be indifferent to flowers—possible but not very likely. Psychiatrists regard a patient’s indifference to flowers as a symptom of clinical depression.
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.
Though we self-importantly regard domestication as something people have done to plants, it is at the same time a strategy by which the plants have exploited us and our desires—even our most idiosyncratic notions of beauty—to advance their own interests. Depending on the environment in which a species finds itself, different adaptations will avail. Mutations that nature would have rejected out of hand in the wild sometimes prove to be brilliant adaptations in an environment that’s been shaped by human desire.
(Very often traits that commend plants and animals to people render them less fit for life in the wild.)
Yet tulipomania in France and England never reached the pitch it would in Holland. How can the mad embrace of these particular people and this particular flower be explained?
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.
It wasn’t until the 1920s, after the invention of the electron microscope, that scientists discovered the virus was being spread from tulip to tulip by Myzus persicae, the peach potato aphid. Peach trees were a common feature of seventeenth-century gardens.
because of people’s idiosyncratic notion of tulip beauty, for several hundred years tulips were selected for a trait that would sicken and eventually kill them.
What a trick! As a survival strategy, the virus’s scheme was brilliant, at least as long as people didn’t figure out what was going on. For where else in nature has a disease rendered a living thing more lovely? And not just lovely, but lovely in a previously unimagined way, for the virus created an entirely new way for a tulip to be beautiful, at least in our eyes. The virus altered the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld suggests that beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health, nor necessarily redound to the benefit of the beautiful.
Still, it’s important to remember that what ended in Holland in madness had begun with the desire for beauty in a place where, it seemed to many, beauty was in comparatively short supply.
the tulip, perhaps the most masculine of flowers. If you doubt this, watch next April how a tulip forces its head up out of the ground, how the head gradually colors as it rises. Dig down along the shaft, and you’ll find its bulb, smooth, rounded, hard as a nut, a form for which the botanists offer a most graphic term: “testiculate.”
Flowers changed everything. The angiosperms, as botanists call the plants that form flowers and then encased seeds, appeared during the Cretaceous period, and they spread over the earth with stunning rapidity. “An abominable mystery” is how Charles Darwin described this sudden and entirely evitable event.
With flowers came fruit and seeds, and these, too, remade life on Earth. By producing sugars and proteins to entice animals to disperse their seed, the angiosperms multiplied the world’s supply of food energy, making possible the rise of large warm-blooded mammals. Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be.
CHAPTER 3 Desire: Intoxication Plant: Marijuana (CANNABIS SATIVA X INDICA)
The plant had adapted more brilliantly to its strange new environment than anyone could have expected. For cannabis, the drug war is what global warming will be for much of the rest of the plant world, a cataclysm that some species will turn into a great opportunity to expand their range. Cannabis has thrived on its taboo the way another plant might thrive in a particularly acid soil.
certain plants or fungi (ethnobotanists call them “entheogens,” meaning “the god within”)
What a natural history of religion would show is that the human experience of the divine has deep roots in psychoactive plants and fungi. (Karl Marx may have gotten it backward when he called religion the opiate of the people.) This is not to diminish anyone’s religious beliefs; to the contrary, that certain plants summon spiritual knowledge is precisely what many religious people have believed, and who’s to say that belief is wrong? Psychoactive plants are bridges between the worlds of matter and spirit or, to update the vocabulary, chemistry and consciousness.
I’d heard so much about the improvements made to marijuana that I felt I had to give it another try, and I promptly discovered that this pot, at least, left me feeling neither stupid nor paranoid. The nonstupid part can, I think, be accounted for by advances in cannabis breeding that make it possible to develop strains eliciting distinctly different mental effects. 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.
THC in cannabis is only mimicking the actions of the brain’s own cannabinoids.
At this point, my digital download from the library was taken away and I started to read the physical book.
