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

by Michael Pollan

What existential difference is there between the human being’s role in this (or any) garden and the bumblebee’s?

I choose the plants, I pull the weeds, I harvest the crops.

In a coevolutionary bargain like the one struck by the bee and the apple tree, the two parties act on each other to advance their individual interests but wind up trading favors: food for the bee, transportation for the apple genes. Consciousness needn’t enter into it on either side, and the traditional distinction between subject and object is meaningless.

All those plants care about is what every being cares about on the most basic genetic level: making more copies of itself.

Evolution may reward interdependence, but our thinking selves continue to prize self-reliance.

Plants are so unlike people that it’s very difficult for us to appreciate fully their complexity and sophistication. Yet plants have been evolving much, much longer than we have, have been inventing new strategies for survival and perfecting their designs for so long that to say that one of us is the more “advanced” really depends on how you define that term, on what “advances” you value.

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 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.

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.

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 species’ designs and desires, as one of the newer bees in Darwin’s garden—ingenious, sometimes reckless, and remarkably unself-conscious.

Even the power over nature that domestication supposedly represents is overstated. It takes two to perform that particular dance, after all, and plenty of plants and animals have elected to sit it out. Try as they might, people have never been able to domesticate the oak tree, whose highly nutritious acorns remain far too bitter for humans to eat.

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.

Two facts about these seeds are worth noting. First, they contain a small quantity of cyanide, probably a defense the apple evolved to discourage animals from biting into them; they’re almost indescribably bitter.

The second, more important fact about those seeds concerns their genetic contents, which are likewise full of surprises. Every seed in that apple, not to mention every seed riding down the Ohio alongside John Chapman, contains the genetic instructions for a completely new and different apple tree, one that, if planted, would bear only the most glancing resemblance to its parents.

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.

Could it be that sweetness is the prototype of all desire?

Anthropologists have found that cultures vary enormously in their liking for bitter, sour, and salty flavors, but a taste for sweetness appears to be universal.

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.

This was not how nature ordinarily appeared to Americans in Chapman’s time. To most of them, the forest was still a heathen chaos.

I saw Chapman now as clearly as I could hope to. Johnny Appleseed was no Christian saint—that left out too much of who he was, what he stood for in our mythology. Who he was, I realized, was the American Dionysus.

Like Johnny Appleseed, Dionysus was a figure of the fluid margins, slipping back and forth between the realms of wildness and civilization, man and woman, man and god, beast and man.

The Greeks regarded Dionysus as the antithesis of Apollo, god of clear boundaries, order, and light, of man’s firm control over nature. Dionysian revelry melts every Apollonian line, so that, as Nietzsche writes, “alienated, hostile, or subjugated nature…celebrates her reconciliation with her lost son, man.”

me. In The Golden Bough, James Frazer says that, in addition to the grapevine, Dionysus was also the patron of cultivated trees and specifically credits him with the discovery of the apple.

This is why, of all the gods, “Dionysus is, for humans, fiercest and most sweet,” according to Euripides. If Apollo is a god of concentrated light, Dionysus, worshiped at night, is a god of dispersed sweetness.

Under his influence “the earth flows, flows beneath us, then milk flows, and wine flows, and nectar flows, like flame.” Under the spell of Dionysus and his wine, all nature answers to our desires.

Sometimes the cause of civilization is best served by a hard stare into the soul of its opposite.

Like Dionysus, John Chapman was an agent of domestication. With every cider orchard he helped plant, the wilderness became that much more hospitable and homelike.

As for sweetness, the complicated metaphorical resonance of that word had by now been flattened out, mainly by the easy availability of cheap sugar.

Sweetness in an apple now meant sugariness, plain and simple.

This whole orchard is a testament to the magic arts of domestication, our knack—our Dionysian knack—for marrying the wildest fruits of nature to the various desires of culture.

“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.”

Like the other canonical flowers—the rose or the peony, say—the tulip has been reinvented every century or so to reflect our shifting ideals of beauty, and for the tulip the story of the twentieth century has mainly been the rise and triumph of all this mass-produced eye candy.

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

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,

The equation of flowers and beauty was apparently made by all the great civilizations of antiquity, though some—notably the Jews and early Christians—set themselves against the celebration and use of flowers. 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.

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. (The exceptions are those parts of Africa that came into early contact with other civilizations—the Islamic north, for example.)

Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices—visual, olfactory, and tactile—to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals.

For many flowers the great love of their lives now is humankind.

“The colors and shapes of the flowers are a precise record of what bees find attractive,” the poet and critic Frederick Turner has written.

That’s because a tulip that falls out of favor soon goes extinct, since the bulbs don’t reliably come back every year.

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.

When the tulip first arrived in Europe, people set about fashioning some utilitarian purpose for it.

The closest we have to a broken tulip today is the group known as the Rembrandts—so named because Rembrandt painted some of the most admired breaks of his time.

The fact that Queen of Night has no detectable scent is fitting: this is an experience designed strictly for the delectation of the eye.

As the day warms, the curve of the stem relaxes and the petals pull back to reveal the flower’s interior space and organs. Like everything else about the tulip, these, too, are explicit and logical.

Everything about tulip sex seems orderly and intelligible; there is none of the occult mystery that attends the sexuality of, say, a Bourbon rose or a doubled peony.

Compared to the other canonical flowers, the beauty of the tulip is classical rather than romantic.

Certainly the rose and peony are Dionysian flowers, deeply sensual and captivating us as much through the senses of touch and smell as sight.

The tulip, by contrast, is all Apollonian clarity and order. It’s a linear, left-brained sort of flower, in no way occult, explicit and logical in its formal rules and arrangements (six petals corresponding to six stamens), and conveying all this rationality the only way conceivable: through the eye.

Friedrich Nietzsche described Apollo, in contrast to Dionysus, as “the god of individuation and just boundaries.”