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

“Its broader subject is the complex reciprocal relationship between the human and natural world, which I approach from a somewhat unconventional angle: I take seriously the plant’s point of view.”

Pollan is “plant-centric” in his book. He adopts the plant’s perspective and shows how they sagely survived through playing to human desires. This is an unorthodox way of looking at the interaction between the human and plant world. 

“After ten thousand years of coevolution, their genes are rich archives of cultural as well as natural information. The DNA of that tulip there, the ivory one with the petals attenuated like sabers, contains detailed instructions on how best to catch the eye not of a bee but of an Ottoman Turk; it has something to tell us about that age’s idea of beauty.” 

Pollan believes that by looking at plants, we can understand the ways in which humans have manipulated them over the years. In the process, we can understand more about the culture, history, and desires of humans. Therefore, history is literally written into the petals of flowers and the leaves of plants. 

“Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That’s why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees.”

Grammar limits the way that we look at the world, the author believes. Plants and humans do not always act as objects and subjects. Instead, they have interacted and continue to interact in complex way in which they act upon each other.  

“Think of this book as that bee’s mirror.”

Pollan advises us to look at ourselves as among the newer bees in the garden of evolution. We, like the bees, are subject to the flowers and plants and spread their genes like bees do. This book is our mirror, helping us understand our role as new bees.

“More than most of us do, Chapman seems to have had a knack for looking at the world from the plants’ point of view—‘pomocentrically,’ you might say. He understood he was working for the apple as much as they were working for him.”

Likening himself to a bumblebee, Chapman understood that while he was selling apple seeds on the frontier, he was also helping the trees spread across the newly settled parts of the country. He was ushering in a golden age for the apple, as much as for the settlers who planted them.

“We give ourselves altogether too much credit in our dealings with other species.”

Pollan writes that we think we can control the domestication of plants. Instead, plants have a way of resisting or participating in domestication and take a role in this process. For example, oak trees work with squirrels to disseminate their acorns and do not choose to work with us on spreading their seed. 

“‘Sweetness without dimension’ is how one pomologist memorably described the Red Delicious; the same might be said of the Johnny Appleseed promulgated by Walt Disney and several generations of American children’s book writers.”

Pollan tries to unearth the real, somewhat strange John Chapman. In the process, he finds that Chapman has been sanitized over the generations and his flavor removed. In the same way, the apple has been ripped of its true flavor and turned into the overly sweet Red Delicious.

“In effect, the apple, like the settlers themselves, had to forsake its former domestic life and return to the wild before it could be reborn as an American.”

The grafts of apple trees from the Old World failed to take root in America. Instead, the seeds of apple trees planted here gave rise to trees that were genetically different from their ancestors. The trees had to change and transform themselves in the New World as much as the settlers themselves did. 

“Sweetness has proved to be a force in evolution. By encasing their seeds in sugary and nutritious flesh, fruiting plants such as the apple hit on an ingenious way of exploiting the mammalian sweet tooth.”

Apples offered a kind of sweet taste that was rare in the days before mass consumption of sugar was possible. Because apples offered one of the most readily available forms of sweetness, humans planted them. Therefore, the trees manipulated our sense of sweetness to multiply.

“Chapman combined the flinty toughness of a Daniel Boone with the gentleness of a Hindu.”

Pollan examines Chapman’s many paradoxes. He was a hardy frontiersman who was also against harming any living thing. Even though he was a devout Christian, he also enjoyed drinking. As he went about the frontier, he brought people God’s word and the seeds from which they could make cider. He embodied these contradictions and was far more complex than the Disney version of him conveys.

“Though Johnny Appleseed may have lacked Dionysus’s complementary fierceness, he did deliver in his person a thrilling, scary reminder of the nearness of savagery and the tenuousness of civilization’s grip.”

Pollan likens John Chapman, or Johnny Appleseed, to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and ecstasy. Although Chapman brought trees to domesticate to the frontier, he was a kind of wood sprite who frolicked on the margin on society. He understood the interplay of nature and civilization and order and the wild.

“This stands for that: flowers by their very nature traffic in a kind of metaphor.”

Flowers are so universally regarded as symbols of beauty that their presence brings to mind metaphorical comparisons. They are highly symbolic, showing how completely they have captured our hearts, souls, and minds. Pollan digs into why we, like the bee, are so besotted with flowers.

“The flowering garden is a place you can 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.”

Pollan tries to pin down what makes the garden so special and flowers so closely identified with beauty. He likens the garden to a buzzing city filled with social interaction, distinct from the sleepy suburbs of forests. Part of flowers’ allure is that the garden is alive with activity and pollination, and we are always drawn to the vicinity of sex. Flowers seem alive with possibility and fecundity. 

“I also think the particular character of the tulip’s beauty made it a good match for the Dutch temperament. Generally bereft of scent, the tulip is the coolest of floral characters.”

Pollan tries to piece together what made the Dutch crazed for tulips. He finds the answer in part in the tulip’s shy, introverted nature. Like the Dutch, the flower is not showy, except in the cases of rare specimens that have color splotches inside that arise from a virus. 

“Color in this gray Calvinist land must have struck the eye with unimaginable force.”

Holland was naturally draped in a monochrome. In addition, its people wore drab, monochromatic colors. The vibrant colors of tulips were more intense than what the Dutch had ever seen, explaining their appeal. 

“Without flowers, we would not be.”

Pollan writes about how flowering plants gave rise to fruits that offered sugars and proteins to animals. The fruits and seeds made large warm-blooded mammals possible, as these animals have higher caloric needs. Therefore, flowers made the development of humans possible. Without them, we could not exist.

“I sometimes think we’ve allowed our gardens to be bowdlerized, that the full range of their powers and possibilities has been sacrificed to a cult of plant prettiness that obscures more dubious truths about nature, our own included.”

Pollan contrasts the modern garden, often grown just to produce pretty specimens, with the gardens of the past, in which people often raised medicinal plants. Gardens in the past were not just prized for beauty but for their utility in growing medicinal and hallucinogenic plants. For this reason, gardens were sometimes associated with witchcraft.

“Deep down I suspect that many gardeners regard themselves as small-time alchemists, transforming the dross of compost (and water and sunlight) into substances of rare value and beauty and power.”

Pollan thinks that modern-day gardeners still feel the magic associated with gardens of yore. Gardeners are still able to be alchemists, who turned useless materials into gold. 

“There was also something bizarrely anomalous about this totalitarian hothouse, with its strict monoculture of genetically identical plants growing in lockstep—such ferocious Apollonian control in a garden ostensibly devoted to Dionysus.”

Pollan writes about the ironic way in which marijuana growers devote great organization and control to the cultivation of their plants. The plants are raised in very controlled circumstances to produce weeds that produce a high. Therefore, the growth process is Apollonian, while the consumption of the plant is Dionysian.

“What a natural history of religion would show is that the human experience of the divine has deep roots in psychoactive plants and fungi.”

Many religions have embraced hallucinogens as part of their rites to enhance the human experience of the transcendent. For example, American Indian religious use peyote, Hindus have used cannabis, and Greeks and early Christians have used wine. These hallucinogens allow people to distance themselves from the passage of time and experience something more sacred.

“Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but the present.”

Pollan writes about how hallucinogens allow people to detach themselves from the minute-by-minute memory of everything that happens around them. By permitting humans this type of freedom, hallucinogens allow people to slow down time and experience the world as a more wondrous place.

“Ironies of this kind are second nature to the gardener, who eventually learns that every advance in his control of the garden is also an invitation to a new disorder.”

Pollan writes that gardeners learn that they can never completely control nature. Instead, every action they take, such as making a garden too orderly, can eventually result in the opposite, such as disorder. The idea of human control of nature is a myth.

“The genetic diversity cultivated by the Incas and their descendants is an extraordinary cultural achievement and a gift of incalculable value to the rest of the world.”

The Incas learned how to grow a broad variety of potatoes in the Andes in a vertical habitat. They planted potatoes that were right for each altitude’s microclimate. Their ingenuity provides an example of biodiversity that others can emulate.