This Is Your Mind on Plants

by Michael Pollan

There was no question that I would have to try to grow it, if only as a historical curiosity. Okay, not only that, but that too. Again, you have to understand the gardener’s mentality. I once grew Jenny Lind melons, a popular nineteenth-century variety named for the most famous soprano of the time, just to see if I could grow them, but also to glean some idea of what the word “melon” might have conjured in the mind of Walt Whitman or Chester Arthur. I planted an heirloom apple tree, “Esopus Spitzenberg,” simply because Thomas Jefferson had planted it at Monticello, declaring it the “finest eating apple in the world.” Gardening is, among other things, an exercise of the historical imagination, and I was by now eager to stare into the black heart of an opium poppy with my own eyes.