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

Pollan recalls discounting the tulip’s beauty when he planted them in his parents’ garden as a kid. Three-and-a-half centuries earlier, tulips ignited a madness in Holland between 1634 and 1637, when the tulip took “a star turn on history’s main stage” (63). The story of “tulipomania” (93), as the Dutch craze is called, helps unpack our obsession with the beauty of flowers. The great civilizations in the ancient world regarded flowers as beautiful, though the ancient Jews and Christians discouraged the use of flowers because they thought they would encourage paganism. Another exception is in Africa, where flowers do not play a role in social ritual.

The human predisposition for flowers might be explicable because we were foragers for most of our existence, and the presence of flowers indicates the presence of future fruit. Flowers were also symbols, to us and to the animals they attracted. Pollan posits that “flowers have always borne the often absurd weight of our meaning-making” (69). They are by definition metaphors, such as the orchid that looks like a female insect to attract males. Pollan presents the flowers in his garden as "dramatis personae" (70), each using a different ruse to attract bees. Flower beds are like metropolises of information, compared to the sedate forests around them. The beauty in nature, Pollan notes, is often associated with sex, or sexual reproduction in the case of flowers, and beauty is also associated with what is considered good. For example, beauty helps creatures identify with whom they should mate. Flowers that are beautiful are also usually those that attract the greatest number of bees and that can engender the greatest number of offspring.

The physical characteristics of flowers that attract other creatures, including humans and bees, to them comprise "their colors and symmetries" (77), as few things in nature are symmetrical and symmetry conveys health. Different kinds of bees are attracted to different forms of symmetry. The few flowers that have distinguished themselves as embodiments of beauty for humans include the rose, the peony (especially in the East), the orchid, and the tulip. Pollan writes that “[i]t’s a lot to ask of a plant, that it take on the changing colors of human dreams” (77). What distinguishes these flowers in part is the many forms and varieties they have.

Because many forms of tulips have been lost over the years, the only way we know about the forms of yesteryear is from paintings or illustrations. A tulip that loses favor goes extinct because its bulbs do not come back reliably each year. The tulip may have gained favor in Europe because of its novelty—it was first introduced in Europe in 1554 by the ambassador of the Austrian Hapsburgs to Suleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople. The tulip bred naturally until the Turks started to make deliberate crosses, favoring tulip varieties with long, needle-like petals (a variety that does not occur in nature). During the reign of Sultan Ahmed III from 1703 to 1730, these prized tulips were purchased in gold in Constantinople. This era was known as lale devri, or"Tulip era" (82). During this time, the sultan mounted lavish displays of tulips, complete with tortoises who carried candles on their backs.

Tulips arrived in force in Holland through the efforts of Carolus Clusius, who brought them with him from Vienna to grow a new physic garden in 1593. His tulips were so covetous that people stole them at night and then sowed their seeds, increasing their variability from their parents. This probably explains the amazing variety of tulips in Holland. As the history of the tulip in Holland is related to theft, Pollan writes that "shame" (84) has long dogged the Dutch history with the tulip, similar to Eve’s pilfering of the apple from the Garden of Eden.

Tulipomania ran rampant in Europe, but it reached a particularly fevered pitch in Holland. Pollan believes this is in part because the Dutch have always had to work hard to transform their flat, swampy landscape, and they wanted to festoon it with color. These were days when, as Pollan writes, “a botanical treatise could become a best-seller” (86). The Dutch were then the wealthiest people in Europe, who displayed their wealth in "jewel [box]" (86) gardens. The tulip had no utilitarian purpose, and “the tulip’s useless beauty suited the Dutch taste for display” (87). He also believes that the tulip’s cool beauty matched the Dutch temperament.

Another factor that drove Dutch tulipomania was that the flowers sometimes burst open with an unexpected color inside. The flower was then said to have “broken” (88), and because it was rare, as were its offshoots, these flowers commanded higher prices. We don’t have many broken tulips left, but illustrations show earlier broken tulips that almost seem marbleized, and Pollan writes that “the outbreak of color juxtaposed with the linear, orderly form of the tulip could be breathtaking” (88). The Dutch did not realize that a virus spread by the peach potato aphid is what caused this broken color. Tulips are composed of a base color that is always white or yellow, and a second, laid-on color called an anthocyanin. The virus causes the anthocyanin to be suppressed to some degree, allowing the color underneath to come through. By the 1920s, tulips were grown for trading purposes, and breeders set out to destroy this virus, which weakened the bulbs. Therefore, a source of the tulip’s wayward beauty was destroyed. The tulip’s popularity by the means of a virus weakens the idea that the tulip managed to use humans to increase its vitality. Growers’ pursuit of broken tulips caused countless tulips to be planted, yet the growth of broken tulips resulted in the growth of the virus. The virus made the flower more beautiful despite ultimately weakening it, yet “beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health” (91).

Now, tulips are more monochrome, and their beauty is harder to notice, as they are less distinctive. Pollan gazes on a single specimen of a Queen of Night tulip to appreciate its beauty. It is as close to black as a flower can get, but it is actually dark purple. The quest to grow a black tulip has continued for over 400 years, its fervor in part explicable by the rarity of the black tulip. While the poet Zbigniew Herbert believes tulipomania was about mania for an idea, rather than beauty, Pollan believes that the Dutch, living in a monochromatic world, were driven by beauty to adore tulips. The Semper Augustus, regarded as the most beautiful tulip of its day, helped ignite the mania, as all dozen or so specimens that existed were grown by Dr. Adriaen Pauw, director of the East India Company, in his garden. He turned down offers to sell them at any price.

In examining his Queen of Night tulip, Pollan finds its features orderly and logical: “Compared to the canonical flowers, the beauty of the tulip is classical rather than romantic” (97). In a world of Dionysian flowers, the tulip is more "Apollonian" (97). Unlike the other canonical flowers, which seem female, Pollan believes the tulip is more masculine in nature.

Pollan glimpses a break of red in tulips in Manhattan, and he waxes rhapsodic about the break. Color breaks like this one gave rise to tulipomania. He writes that these breaks were “an explosive outbreak of the Dionysian in the too-strict Apollonian world of the tulip” (101). Tulipomania had the feeling of a carnival, when the orderly world was set on its head. People engaged in wild speculation for slips of paper promising them future flowers. They came to make tulip deals in the back rooms of taverns and drank to celebrate the consummation of securing one. When the speculation for tulips collapsed, the flowers themselves were blamed for the mania—they were referred as “the great garden-whore” (104), among other names.

The tulip frenzy was like a spasm of color in an otherwise orderly tulip, as Holland was a generally orderly, "bourgeois" (105) nation. The third appeal of the tulip, in addition to its contrast and form, was its variation. The allure of the broken tulip comes from the break of order and predictability.

Pollan writes that in the ancient world before flowers, beauty in the form of desire did not exist. Flowers changed everything, as they enlisted animals in spreading their seed, and evolution did not just occur by dint of water or wind. Evolution sped up, and the seed of flowers made larger mammals, not just reptiles, possible: “Without flowers, we would not be” (109). Flowers gave rise to humans, and we became their greatest admirers, finding in the flower both the Dionysian and Apollonian and the essence of beauty.