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?

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.

We give ourselves altogether too much credit in our dealings with other species. 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. Evidently the oak has such a satisfactory arrangement with the squirrel—which obligingly forgets where it has buried every fourth acorn or so (admittedly, the estimate is Beatrix Potter’s)—that the tree has never needed to enter into any kind of formal arrangement with us.

Sweetness is a desire that starts on the tongue with the sense of taste, but it doesn’t end there. Or at least it didn’t end there, back when the experience of sweetness was so special that the word served as a metaphor for a certain kind of perfection.

The best land was said to be sweet; so were the most pleasing sounds, the most persuasive talk, the loveliest views, the most refined people, and the choicest part of any whole, as when Shakespeare calls spring the “sweet o’ the year.” Lent by the tongue to all the other sense organs, “sweet,” in the somewhat archaic definition of the Oxford English Dictionary, is that which “affords enjoyment or gratifies desire.” Like a shimmering equal sign, the word sweetness denoted a reality commensurate with human desire: it stood for fulfillment.

“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.”

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. It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person’s mind, that mind’s connection to the sensual world has grown dangerously frayed.

Let’s say we are born with such a predisposition—that humans, like bees, are drawn instinctively to flowers. It’s obvious what good it does bees to be born liking flowers, but what conceivable benefit could such a predilection offer people? Some evolutionary psychologists have proposed an interesting answer. Their hypothesis can’t be proven, at least not until scientists begin to identify genes for human preferences, but it goes like this: Our brains developed under the pressure of natural selection to make us good foragers, which is how humans have spent 99 percent of their time on Earth. 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. According to the neuroscientist Steven Pinker, who outlines this theory in How the Mind Works, natural selection was bound to favor those among our ancestors who noticed flowers and had a gift for botanizing—for recognizing plants, classifying them, and then remembering where they grow. In time the moment of recognition—much like the quickening one feels whenever an object of desire is spotted in the landscape—would become pleasurable, and the signifying thing a thing of beauty.

But wouldn’t it make more sense if people were simply hardwired to recognize fruit itself, forget the flowers? Perhaps, but recognizing and recalling flowers helps a forager get to fruit first, before the competition. Because I know exactly where on my road the blackberry canes flowered last month, I stand a much better chance of getting to the berries this month before anyone else or any birds do.

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

Making my way through this lit-up landscape, I try to pin down exactly what distinguishes the garden in bloom from an ordinary patch of nature. For starters, the flowering garden is a place you immediately sense is thick with information, thick as a metropolis, in fact. It’s an oddly sociable, public sort of place, in which species seem eager to give one another the time of day; they dress up, flirt, flit, visit. By comparison, the surrounding forests and fields are much sleepier boroughs, steadily humming monotonies of green, in which many of the flowers are inconspicuous or short-lived and many of the plants seem to be keeping to their own kind, declining to enlist other species, minding their own business. That business is chiefly photosynthesis, of course, nature’s routine factory work; sexual reproduction is going on here too, but with little to show for it: Who ever notices when the conifers release their pollen on the wind, the ferns their minute spores? April through October, every day looks pretty much the same around here. What beauty there is is in large part inadvertent, purposeless, and unadvertised. Come into the garden, or even the flowering meadow, and the landscape immediately quickens. Hey, what’s going on here today? Something, senses even the dimmest bee or boy, something special.

Living things have always had to make their way in a wild garden of flowers and vines, of leaves and trees and fungi that hold out not only nourishing things to eat but deadly poisons, too. Nothing is more important to a creature’s survival than knowing which is which, yet drawing a bright line through the middle of the garden, as the God of Genesis found, doesn’t always work. The difficulty is that there are plants that do other, more curious things than simply sustain or extinguish life. Some heal; others rouse or calm or quiet the body’s pain. But most remarkable of all, there are plants in the garden that manufacture molecules with the power to change the subjective experience of reality we call consciousness.

For even in Grandmother’s garden you’re apt to find datura and morning glories (the seeds of which some Indians consume as a sacramental hallucinogen) and opium poppies—right there, the makings of a witch’s flying ointment or apothecary’s tonic. The knowledge that once attended these powerful plants, however, has all but vanished. And as soon as this plant knowledge is restored to consciousness—as soon as, say, one forms the intention of slitting the head of an opium poppy to release its narcotic sap—so too must be its taboo. 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.” Evidently the Old Testament and the criminal code both make a connection between forbidden plants and knowledge.

The swiftness of this change in the weather, the demonizing of a plant that less than twenty years ago was on the cusp of general acceptance, will surely puzzle historians of the future. They will wonder why it was that the “drug war” of the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s fought the vast majority of its battles over marijuana.* They will wonder why, during this period, Americans jailed more of their citizens than any other country in history, and why one of every three of those were in prison because of their involvement with drugs, nearly fifty thousand of them solely for crimes involving marijuana. And they will wonder why Americans would have been willing to give up so many of their hard-won liberties in the fight against this plant. For in the last years of the twentieth century a series of Supreme Court cases and government actions specifically involving marijuana led to a substantial increase in the power of the government at the expense of the Bill of Rights.† As a result of the war against cannabis, Americans are demonstrably less free today.

Did marijuana pose a grave threat to public health, or was marijuana the only illicit drug in wide enough use to justify waging so ambitious a war in the first place?

What is harder to comprehend is why virtually all people, and more than a few animals, should have acquired such a desire in the first place. What good, from an evolutionary standpoint, could it do a creature to consume psychoactive plants? Possibly none at all: it’s a fallacy to assume that whatever is is that way for a good Darwinian reason. Just because a desire or practice is widespread or universal doesn’t necessarily mean it confers an evolutionary edge.

a select group of psychoactive plants and fungi (among them the peyote cactus, the Amanita muscaria and psilocybin mushrooms, the ergot fungus, the fermented grape, ayahuasca, and cannabis) were present at the creation of several of the world’s religions.

Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting—on a process, that is, of subtraction. Ordinarily we think of drug experiences as additive—it’s often said that drugs “distort” normal perceptions and augment the data of the senses (adding hallucinations, say), but it may be that the very opposite is true—that they work by subtracting some of the filters that consciousness normally interposes between us and the world.