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

Pollan sets the scene along the Ohio River near Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1806. John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, is riding the rapids down the river in a kind of catamaran fashioned out of two canoes placed side by side. He plans to plant apple seeds along the Ohio River. Since one bushel of apple seeds could plant over 300,000 trees, Pollan believes that entire orchards lay in Chapman’s catamaran.

To Pollan, the story of Chapman is the story of how plants and animals relied on each other to do what each could not. Through the efforts of people like Chapman, the American wilderness became planted with “exotics” (5)—seeds from elsewhere—while the apple blossomed into new varieties and occupied a new habitat. Pollan regards Chapman’s story as perfectly reciprocal between the human and the plant. He believes that Chapman was capable of seeing the world from the apple’s point of view—or “pomocentrically” (5), in his words. He compared himself to a bee and designed his catamaran so that he and the seeds would float down the river together.

Pollan writes that humans overestimate their powers of domestication: “We give ourselves altogether too much credit in our dealings with other species” (5). For example, the oak tree has resisted this process, as it relies instead on the squirrel, which, in Beatrix Potter’s estimation, loses every fourth acorn it buries. The apple has done such a good job of domesticating itself in America that we assume it is native, while it is not.

Pollan goes to a spot near Steubenville, Ohio, where Chapman first crossed the Ohio River, to trace the history of John Chapman, who, he claims, has been sweetened as much throughout history as the apple itself has. Chapman’s biographer, Robert Price, describes his subject as strange. Price writes that Chapman “was not a complete crank” (7). Chapman was more at home with Indians and children, and he was a strict vegetarian who hated injuring any living thing. Coming west from Longmeadow, Massachusetts, in 1797 at age 23, Chapman stayed ahead of the western movement of settlers. He planted trees and then sold them to settlers and moved on. By the time he died in 1845 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, he owned 1,200 acres.

Pollan suspected that there was more to Chapman than the Golden Books versions suggests, in part because Chapman may have had a child bride and in part because apple trees with edible apples do not come from seeds but from grafted trees. Pollan writes that he wants to discover the truth in the historical story— “his and the apple’s both” (10). Instead, the trees Chapman planted were used for hard cider—so Chapman was bringing alcohol to the west. The apple only became associated with health in the early 1900s as a response to the temperance movement. This same movement probably sanitized the history of John Chapman.

When you slice an apple, you will find five chambers inside that house the seeds. The seeds contain a miniscule amount of cyanide, to dissuade predators from biting into the apple, and each seed contains the genetic information for a new tree that would not resemble its parents. The botanical term for this difference from one’s parents is “heterozygosity” (10). The apple represents an extreme version of it, which is why it is "at home" (11) in so many places around the world. The ancestor of the Malus domestica probably comes from Kazakhstan, and then apples traveled west along the Silk Route, mixing with native species. The Chinese first figured out how to graft trees in the second millennium B.C.E. to reproduce trees that resemble their parents. This process allowed the Greeks and Romans to produce the choicest specimens, and later apples traveled to America.

In America, the apple tree had a "rebirth" of sorts, as the "Old World apple trees"(12)did not prosper here since the winters were colder. From seeds the colonists planted, “pippins” (12) grew. The trees had to revert to wild, sexual reproduction to find a way to survive, perhaps mixing with native crab apple varieties. Therefore, like the people themselves, apples evolved into a new "stock" (13) suited for their new home.

Pollan travels to Marietta, Ohio, which once served as the gateway to the Northwest Territory. Rufus Putnam, one of the first arrivals, had planted apple trees to sell to people passing through. While his apples were not the best, Chapman offered something else—he moved along with the settlers to the shifting frontier. Getting a land grant in the Northwest Territory required a settler to plant 50 apple or pear trees so that they would stay put and would not engage in land speculation. Planting an orchard was a sign of domesticating wilderness. The apple also offered pioneers a taste of sweetness when sugar was beyond the reach of most people (and was later associated with slavery so that many people avoided it).

“Sweetness” in the classical sense of the word means something that satisfies a desire. Sweetness has now become literally saccharine, but it was originally associated with purity. The experience of tasting sweetness and the metaphorical meaning of sweetness capture the power of the apple. According to Pollan, anthropologists believe sweetness is a "universal" (19) taste. Apples exploited mammals’ taste for sweetness in exchange for helping to spread the fruit’s seeds. Pollan emphasizes that “sweetness has proved to be a force in evolution” (19).

In America, frontiersmen wanted the apple because it symbolized home, and it was also long associated with the Garden of Eden and with Protestantism. The alcohol made from the fermentation of sugar was also "the other great beneficence of sugar" (21). Hard cider became the drink of choice on the frontier, as it was easy to make and less potent than corn liquor. The cider was often drunk even in place of water as it was "more sanitary" (22). It was only later that the apple acquired its reputation for health. John Chapman’s success was due to the fruit’s association with alcohol.

Pollan went to Mount Vernon, Ohio, to meet with Chapman booster William "Bill" Ellery Jones, who regarded Chapman as a hero. They visited various sites associated with Chapman in the area while Jones dished out facts about Chapman, combined with myth. Chapman had built up a sizeable landholding, keeping settlers off his claim, which suggested that he was far from "feckless" (26). However, he was clearly odd. Jones dwelled on Chapman’s heroism, calling him “a hero for our time” (24), including his dash from Mansfield to Mount Vernon to warn settlers that Indians were on the way to attack. Chapman also devoted himself to spreading "Swedenborgian doctrine" (27), which stressed the connections of earth to parts of the afterlife. He believed every living thing was divine and would have rather doused his fire than burn a bug. His feet were tough from not wearing any shoes, and he seemed in union with nature. Chapman is also dogged by shadowy stories about his love life, including the rumor that he arranged with a family to raise their 10-year-old daughter to marry him—a story Jones denies. In contrast, Jones’s tale of Chapman, which he tells to raise money for a Heritage Center and Outdoor Theater, is sanitized.

Pollan set off down the Mohican River by canoe with Jones to get a fuller sense of Chapman. He saw Chapman’s vineyards, adjacent to Indian land, as Chapman crossed easily from the white frontier to the world of Indians. Chapman was a study in contradictions, as he was a holy man who liked to drink, a tough frontiersman who would not hurt a fly, and a lover of nature who wanted to domesticate it. Pollan believes that Chapman’s Swedenborgian philosophy informed his desire to resolve "the paradoxes" (34) between the nature world and the divine. Instead of seeing contradictions between matter and spirit, he saw the natural world as illuminating:“[I]n his eyes even the lowliest worm glowed with divine purpose” (27). Pollan images Chapman as a kind of wood sprite, almost a "pagan god," in contrast to Jones’s plaster "Christian saint"(37) version of Chapman.

Pollan conducted research on Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, who was, unlike Apollo, the deity who oversaw the merger of plants and people. Dionysus was the symbol of the domestication of wilderness and of the wilderness itself, much like Chapman. Pollan refers to Chapman as “Dionysus’s American son” (37). Wine itself embraces the contradictions of ecstasy and destruction, of wilderness and cultivation. Chapman may have appeared like a god-like figure to the people he visited on the frontier. He was also, like Dionysus, an expert at domestication. By bringing seeds to the frontier, he carried out the kind of hybridization process that is usually conducted by nature.

Pollan traveled to the government-controlled Plant Genetic Resources Unit in Geneva, New York, to sample American (and other) varieties of apples. Some that flourished in America were tasteless. Nonetheless, the variety of names of American apples are broad and diverse, and no other fruit has so many famous kinds. Pollan tells the stories of apple varieties that became famous, such as the Delicious, and likens them to American "rags-to-riches fables" (48). Pollan believes that American apples went through the same kinds of acculturation process as its people.

Today, however, there are fewer varieties of apples than in the past, as a great winnowing of apple types happened around the turn of the 20th century—a result of the temperance movement’s crackdown on cider. In addition, commercial interests took over cultivating apples and decided to grow a few choice varieties. Most apples today—which have to compete with sugary snack foods, what Pollan calls the “sweetness arms race with junk food” (51)—are descended from the Delicious, and the orchard in Geneva, New York, is a kind of museum of the huge apple genome of yore. The apple genome is not evolving, as its plants are reproduced from grafting, and they don’t reproduce sexually. The greatest biodiversity of apples exists in Kazakhstan, where apples originated, and Phil Forsline, the curator of the orchard at Geneva, is collecting some of this genetic diversity. The orchard at Geneva shows that we can achieve greatness through domestication, but we can also go too far in this process, as a plant that relies on too few genes can fail to thrive in the outdoors.