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

by Michael Pollan

It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins. We are shaping the evolutionary weather in ways Darwin could never have foreseen; indeed, even the weather itself is in some sense an artifact now, its temperatures and storms the reflection of our actions. For a great many species today, “fitness” means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force.

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.

In Swedenborg’s philosophy there is no rift between the natural world and the divine. Much like Emerson, who cited him as an influence, Swedenborg claimed that there were one-to-one “correspondences” between natural and spiritual facts, so that close attention and devotion to the former would advance one’s understanding of the latter.

Everything before us was doubled; not this world or that, but both. Fervently held, such beliefs must have lit up the whole landscape—the rivers and trees, the bears and wolves and crows, even the mosquitoes—with a divine glow.

I approached gardening as a form of alchemy, a quasi-magical system for transforming seeds and soil and water and sunlight into things of value, and as long as you couldn’t grow toys or LPs, that more or less meant groceries.

But it wasn’t out of blindness to their beauty that Jews and Christians discouraged flowers; to the contrary, devotion to flowers posed a challenge to monotheism, was a bright ember of pagan nature worship that needed to be smothered. Incredibly, there were no flowers in Eden—or, more likely, the flowers were weeded out of Eden when Genesis was written down.

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. The “not quite” refers to Africa, where, Goody writes in The Culture of Flowers, flowers play almost no part in religious observance or everyday social ritual.

Goody offers two possible explanations for the absence of a culture of flowers in Africa, one economic, the other ecological. The economic explanation is that people can’t afford to pay attention to flowers until they have enough to eat; a well-developed culture of flowers is a luxury that most of Africa historically has not been able to support. The other explanation is that the ecology of Africa doesn’t offer a lot of flowers, or at least not a lot of showy ones. Relatively few of the world’s domesticated flowers have come from Africa, and the range of flower species on the continent is nowhere near as extensive as it is in, say, Asia or even North America.

As Goody points out, Africans quickly adopted a culture of flowers wherever others introduced it. Maybe the love of flowers is a predilection all people share, but it’s one that cannot itself flower until conditions are ripe—until there are lots of flowers around and enough leisure to stop and smell them.

The presence of flowers, as even I understood as a boy, is a reliable predictor of future food. People who were drawn to flowers, and who further could distinguish among them and then remember where in the landscape they’d seen them, would be much more successful foragers than people who were blind to their significance.

natural selection was bound to favor those among our ancestors who noticed flowers and had a gift for botanizing—

The flower has evolved exactly the right pattern of curves and spots and hairiness to convince certain male insects that it is a female as viewed, tantalizingly, from behind. Botanists call the resultant behavior on the part of the male insect “pseudocopulation”; they call the flower that inspires this behavior the “prostitute orchid.” In his frenzy of attempted intercourse, the insect ensures the orchid’s pollination. That’s because the insect’s rising frustration compels him to rush around mounting one blossom after another, effectively disseminating the flower’s genes, if not his own.

Tangled up in their petals and seemingly inebriated, the Japanese beetles are dining and humping intently, sometimes three and four of them going at it at once; it’s a very Roman scene, and it leaves the blossoms trashed. Farther down the garden path the daylilies lean forward expectantly, like dogs; tiny wasps accept the invitation to climb way up into their throats in search of nectar; afterward the bugs come stumbling out like drunks from a bar. Before they hit the open air, though, they jostle the lily’s dainty scoop of stamens, chalking themselves with pollen they’ll later dust off on the pistils of some other blossom.*

The sweet peas extend themselves seductively on slender stems, but a bee can’t gain admittance to their flowers without first prying open their pursed lips; this coy bit of architecture leaves the (erroneous) impression that it is the bee’s desire being gratified here, not the pea’s.

over time Chinese peonies evolved, by means of artificial selection, to gratify that conceit. Even the perfume of certain Chinese tree peonies is womanly, a scent of flowers tinged with briny sweat; the flowers smell less like perfume out of the bottle than a scent that’s spent time on human skin. It may still attract the bees, but by now it’s our brain stems the scent is meant to fire.

There may or may not be a correlation between the beautiful and the good, but there probably is one between beauty and health. (Which, I suppose, in Darwinian terms, is the good.) Evolutionary biologists believe that in many creatures beauty is a reliable indicator of health, and therefore a perfectly sensible way to choose one mate over another. Gorgeous plumage, lustrous hair, symmetrical features are “certificates of health,” as one scientist puts it, advertisements that a creature carries genes for resistance to parasites* and is not otherwise under stress.

It’s the healthiest flowers that can afford the most extravagant display and sweetest nectar, thereby ensuring the most visits from bees—and therefore the most sex and most offspring. So in a sense, the flowers do choose their mates on the basis of health, using the bees as their proxies.

Green appears gray, a background hue against which red—which bees perceive as black—stands out most sharply. (Bees can also see at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, where we’re blind; a garden in this light must look like a big-city airport at night, lit up and color-coded to direct circling bees to landing zones of nectar and pollen.)

Symmetry is an unmistakable sign that there’s relevant information in a place. That’s because symmetry is a property shared by a relatively small number of things in the landscape, all of them of keen interest to us.

Symmetry is also a sign of health in a creature, since mutations and environmental stresses can easily disturb it. So paying attention to symmetrical things makes good sense: symmetry is usually significant.

For it seems that different kinds of bees are attracted to different kinds of symmetry. Honeybees favor the radial symmetry of daisies and clover and sunflowers, while bumblebees prefer the bilateral symmetry of orchids, peas, and foxgloves.*

There are flowers, and then there are flowers: flowers, I mean, around which whole cultures have sprung up, flowers with an empire’s worth of history behind them, flowers whose form and color and scent, whose very genes carry reflections of people’s ideas and desires through time like great books.

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.

Even when people do continue to plant a particular tulip, the vigor of that variety (which is propagated by removing and planting the bulb’s “offsets,” the little, genetically identical bulblets that form at its base) eventually fades until it must be abandoned. Breeders today are busily seeking a new black tulip because they know the current standard-bearer—Queen of Night—is probably on her way out. Tulips, in other words, are mortal.

Holland’s tulips were mentioned in the same breath as its invincible navy and unparalleled republican liberties.

(This was not the first or last time a theft attended the appearance of a new plant; the potato might never have prospered in France if not for a similar theft from the royal gardens of Louis XVI.)

For the Dutch, at least, shame has shadowed the tulip’s story from the start, though fainter manifestations of the same shadow are probably never far from the culture of flowers. It’s there in the wastefulness and extravagance we

often associate with flowers, in the sensual pleasure we take in them, in our satisfaction at forcing them beyond their natural forms and colors and blooming times, even in the tiny pang that can accompany the petty theft of a flower that’s been cut and brought indoors.

Land in Holland being so scarce and expensive, Dutch gardens were miniatures, measured in square feet rather than acres and frequently augmented with mirrors. The Dutch thought of their gardens as jewel boxes, and in such a space even a single flower—and especially one as erect, singular, and strikingly colored as a tulip—could make a powerful statement.

The exoticism and expense of tulips certainly recommended them for this purpose, but so did the fact that, among flowers, the tulip is one of the most extravagantly useless. Up until the Renaissance, most of the flowers in cultivation had been useful as well as beautiful; they were sources of medicine, perfume, or even food.

It was utility, not beauty, that earned the rose and lily, the peony and all the rest a spot in the gardens of monks and Shakers and colonial Americans who would otherwise have had nothing to do with them.

If the tulip’s useless beauty suited the Dutch taste for display, it also meshed with the age’s humanism, which was striving to put some breathing space between art and religion.

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.

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.

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.

This would seem to represent a perversion of natural selection, a violation of the laws of nature. And so it is—considered from the vantage point of the tulip. But what if the question is considered instead from the vantage point of the virus? The rule of law is restored. What the virus did was to insinuate itself into the relationship between people and flowers, in effect exploiting human ideas of tulip beauty in order to advance its own selfish purposes.

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.

“Beauty always takes place in the particular,” the critic Elaine Scarry has written, “and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down.” In a sense, particular tulips are hard to come by—because they are so cheap and ubiquitous, that’s partly why, but also because their form and color are, more than those of most flowers, peculiarly abstract.

In the garden, depending on the angle of the sun, the blossoms of a Queen of Night may read as positive or negative space, as flowers or shadows of a flower.

Black also carries connotations of evil, and the mania would later come to be seen as a morality tale about worldly temptation, in which a whole people succumbed, ruinously, to not one but an entire bouquet of deadly sins.

In this, I think, lies the key to the distinctive personality of the tulip, if not to the nature of floral beauty in general. Compared to the other canonical flowers, the beauty of the tulip is classical rather than romantic. Or, to borrow the useful dichotomy drawn by the Greeks, the tulip is that rare figure of Apollonian beauty in a horticultural pantheon mainly presided over by Dionysus.

And there was something thrilling about it—I could hardly believe my luck. To me that careless splash of red seemed almost like a visitation—of the distant tulip past, yes, for here was the return of the virus so assiduously repressed, but of something else, too, some inchoate, underground force that riveted me. It was as if the whole grid of flowers and, by extension, the grid of the city itself had been put in doubt by that one ecstatic, wayward pulse of life. (Or was it death? I guess you’d have to say it was both.)

Tulipomania bore all the hallmarks of a medieval carnival, in which, for a brief “orgasmic interim” (in the words of the French historian Le Roy Ladurie), the stable order of society was turned on its head. A carnival is a social ritual of sanctioned craziness and release—

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.

(Flora was, of course, the Roman goddess of flowers, who was a prostitute famous for bankrupting her lovers.)

Etymologically, the word extravagant means to wander off a path or cross a line—orderly lines, of course, being Apollo’s special domain. In this may lie a clue to the abiding power of the tulip, as well as, perhaps, to the nature of beauty. The tulip is a flower that draws some of the most exquisite lines in nature and then, in spasms of extravagance, blithely oversteps them.

The world before flowers was sleepier than ours because, lacking fruit and large seeds, it couldn’t support many warm-blooded creatures. Reptiles ruled, and life slowed to a crawl whenever it got cold; little happened at night.

The evolution of plants proceeded according to a new motive force: attraction between different species. Now natural selection favored blooms that could rivet the attention of pollinators, fruits that appealed to foragers. The desires of other creatures became paramount in the evolution of plants, for the simple reason that the plants that succeeded at gratifying those desires wound up with more offspring. Beauty had emerged as a survival strategy.

So as a general rule, sweet is good, bitter bad. Yet it turns out that it is some of the bitter, bad plants that contain the most powerful magic—that can answer our desire to alter the textures and even the contents of our consciousness.

Some plant toxins, such as nicotine, paralyze or convulse the muscles of pests who ingest them.