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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.
pomace
The apple has been far more eager to do business with humans, and perhaps nowhere more so than in America. Like generations of other immigrants before and after, the apple has made itself at home here. In fact, the apple did such a convincing job of this that most of us wrongly assume the plant is a native.
tang
The fact, simply, is this: apples don’t “come true” from seeds—that is, an apple tree grown from a seed will be a wildling bearing little resemblance to its parent. Anyone who wants edible apples plants grafted trees, for the fruit of seedling apples is almost always inedible—“sour enough,” Thoreau once wrote, “to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.”
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. The identification of the apple with notions of health and wholesomeness turns out to be a modern invention, part of a public relations campaign dreamed up by the apple industry in the early 1900s to reposition a fruit that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had declared war on.
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. If not for grafting—the ancient technique of cloning trees—every apple in the world would be its own distinct variety, and it would be impossible to keep a good one going beyond the life span of that particular tree.
Between bites Isaac gazed up at me in amazement (he was on my lap, and I was delivering the ambrosial forkfuls to his gaping mouth) as if to exclaim, “Your world contains this? From this day forward I shall dedicate my life to it.” (Which he basically has done.)
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.
It wasn’t until this century that the apple acquired its reputation for wholesomeness—“An apple a day keeps the doctor away” was a marketing slogan dreamed up by growers concerned that temperance would cut into sales.
Swedenborgian doctrine, which holds that everything here on Earth corresponds directly to something in the afterlife, might explain the strange and wonderful ways Chapman conducted himself in nature.
The Greeks, who were much better at holding contradictory ideas in their minds than we are, understood that intoxication could be divine or wretched, a ceremony of human communion or madness, depending on the care taken in handling its magic.
He’s convinced that the modern history of the apple—particularly the practice of growing a dwindling handful of cloned varieties in vast orchards—has rendered it less fit as a plant, which is one reason modern apples require more pesticide than any other food crop. Forsline explained why this is so.
Put another way, the domestication of the apple has gone too far, to the point where the species’ fitness for life in nature (where it still has to live, after all) has been dangerously compromised. Reduced to the handful of genetically identical clones that suit our taste and agricultural practice, the apple has lost the crucial variability—the wildness—that sexual reproduction confers.
It was Nikolai Vavilov, the great Russian botanist, who first identified the wild apple’s Eden in the forests around Alma-Ata, in Kazakhstan, in 1929. (This wouldn’t have come as news to the locals, however: Alma-Ata means “father of the apple.”)
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.
What the Victorians failed to consider was that the Ophryus might resemble an insect precisely in order to attract insects to it. 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.”
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.
symmetry in a plant is an extravagance (whereas animals who want to move in a straight line can’t do without it), and natural selection probably wouldn’t go to the trouble if the bees didn’t reward the effort.
Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, ambassador of the Austrian Hapsburgs to the court of Süleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople, claimed to have introduced the tulip to Europe, sending a consignment of bulbs west from Constantinople soon after he arrived there in 1554. (The word tulip is a corruption of the Turkish word for “turban.”)
Very often in myth a theft, and its consequence of shame, lies at the root of a human achievement—think of Prometheus’s theft of fire from the sun or Eve’s tasting of the fruit of knowledge.
Such dreams could be indulged as never before in seventeenth-century Holland, as Dutch traders and plant explorers returned home with a parade of exotic new plant species. Botany became a national pastime, followed as closely and avidly as we follow sports today. This was a nation, and a time, in which a botanical treatise could become a best-seller and a plantsman like Clusius a celebrity.
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. To make such statements—about one’s sophistication, about one’s wealth—has always been one of the reasons people plant gardens.
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
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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.
“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.”
Etymologically, the word extravagant means to wander off a path or cross a line—orderly lines, of course, being Apollo’s special domain.
Great art is born when Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy are held in balance, when our dreams of order and abandon come together.
Since bestowing one’s pollen on an insect that might deliver it to the wrong address (such as the blossoms of unrelated species) was wasteful, it became an advantage to look and smell as distinctive as possible, the better to command the undivided attention of a single, dedicated pollinator.
There it is, right in the middle of the word intoxication, hidden in plain sight: toxic. The bright line between food and poison might hold, but not the one between poison and desire.
Some of these molecules are outright poisons, designed simply to kill. But one of the great lessons of coevolution (a lesson recently learned by designers of pesticides and antibiotics) is that the all-out victory of one species over another is often Pyrrhic. That’s because a powerful, death-dealing toxin can exert such a strong selective pressure for resistance in its target population that it is quickly rendered ineffective; a better strategy may be to repel, disable, or confound.
Some plant toxins, such as nicotine, paralyze or convulse the muscles of pests who ingest them. Others, such as caffeine, unhinge an insect’s nervous system and kill its appetite. Toxins in datura (and henbane and a great many other hallucinogens) drive a plant’s predators mad, stuffing their brains with visions distracting or horrible enough to take the creatures’ mind off lunch. Compounds called flavonoids change the taste of plant flesh on the tongues of certain animals, rendering the sweetest fruit sour or the sourest flesh sweet, depending on the plant’s designs. Photosensitizers present
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Cattle will develop a taste for locoweed that can prove fatal; bighorn sheep will grind their teeth to useless nubs scraping a hallucinogenic lichen off ledge rock. Siegel suggests that some of these adventurous animals served as our Virgils in the garden of psychoactive plants. Goats, who will try a little bit of anything, probably deserve credit for the discovery of coffee: Abyssinian herders in the tenth century observed that their animals would become particularly frisky after nibbling the shrub’s bright red berries. Pigeons spacing out on cannabis seeds (a favorite food of many birds) may
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I learned later that catnip contains a chemical compound, called “nepetalactone,” which mimics the pheromone cats produce in their urine during courtship. This chemical key just happens to fit an aphrodisiac lock in a cat’s brain and apparently no other.
Witches and sorcerers cultivated plants with the power to “cast spells”—in our vocabulary, “psychoactive” plants. Their potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladonna, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria), and the skins of toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen). 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.
Curiously, growing Papaver somniferum in America is legal—unless, that is, it is done in the knowledge that you are growing a drug, when, rather magically, the exact same physical act becomes the felony of “manufacturing a controlled substance.”
(Nowadays, of course, only the unpollinated female flowers—called sinsemilla—are deemed worthwhile; growers simply throw the leaves and stems onto the compost pile.)
Initially, indicas were grown by themselves. But enterprising growers soon discovered that by crossing the new species with Cannabis sativa, it was possible to produce vigorous hybrids that would combine the most desirable traits of each plant while downplaying its worst. The smoother taste and “clear, belllike high” associated with the best equatorial sativas, for example, could be combined with the superior potency and hardiness of an indica. The result was what Robert Connell Clarke, a marijuana botanist I met in Amsterdam, calls “the great revolution” in cannabis genetics.*
Even today the sativa X indica hybrids developed during this period—including Northern Lights, Skunk #1, Big Bud, and California Orange—are regarded as the benchmarks of modern marijuana breeding; they remain the principal genetic lines with which most subsequent breeders have worked.
By judiciously manipulating the five main environmental factors under their control—water, nutrients, light, carbon dioxide levels, and heat—as well as the genetics of the plant, growers found that the marijuana plant, this remarkably obliging weed, could be made to perform wonders.
During this period, cannabis genetics improved to the point where it was no longer unusual to find sinsemilla with concentrations of THC, marijuana’s principal psychoactive compound, as high as 15 percent. (Before the crackdown on marijuana growers, THC levels in ordinary marijuana ranged from 2 to 3 percent, according to the DEA; for sinsemilla, 5 to 8 percent.) Nowadays THC levels upward of 20 percent are not unheard of.
These sedulous attentions would be wasted on male plants, which are worse than useless in sinsemilla production. As long as a female marijuana plant remains unpollinated, it will continue to produce new calyxes, steadily adding to the length of its flower. In this state of perpetual sexual frustration, the plant also continues to produce large quantities of THC-rich resins. But allow even a few grains of pollen to reach the plant’s flowers, and the process abruptly stops: bud and resin production shuts down, the plant commences producing seeds—and the sinsemilla is ruined.
Sea of Green garden consisting of a hundred clones, grown under a pair of thousand-watt lights in a space no bigger than a pool table, will yield three pounds of sinsemilla in two months’ time.
spangly
Andrew Weil, who has written two valuable books treating consciousness changing “as a basic human activity,” points out that even young children seek out altered states of awareness. They will spin until violently dizzy (thereby producing visual hallucinations), deliberately hyperventilate, throttle one another to the point of fainting, inhale any fumes they can find, and, on a daily basis, seek the rush of energy supplied by processed sugar (sugar being the child’s plant drug of choice).
one culture’s panacea is often another culture’s panapathogen (root of all evil); think of the traditional role of alcohol in the Christian West as compared to the Islamic East.
Historians can explain these shifts much better than scientists can, since they usually have less to do with the intrinsic nature of the various molecules involved than with the powers that cultures ascribe to them and the changing needs of those cultures. Cannabis in American culture has at various times held the power to foster violence (in the 1930s) and indolence (today): same molecule, opposite effect. Promoting certain plant drugs and forbidding others may just be something cultures do as a way of defining themselves or reinforcing their cohesion.
In fact, the human penchant for drugs may be the accidental by-product of two completely different adaptive behaviors. This at least is the theory Steven Pinker proposes in How the Mind Works. He points out that evolution has endowed the human brain with two (formerly) unrelated faculties: its superior problem-solving abilities and an internal system of chemical rewards, such that when a person does something especially useful or heroic the brain is washed in chemicals that make it feel good. Bring the first of these faculties to bear on the second, and you wind up with a creature who has
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“Transparent” is a term used to characterize drugs whose effects on consciousness are too subtle to interfere with one’s ability to get through the day and fulfill one’s obligations. Drugs such as coffee, tea, and tobacco in our culture, or coca and khat leaves in others, leave the user’s space-time coordinates untouched.
