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

by Michael Pollan

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.