The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World. . - We're All Tools of Plants - book review

Michael Pollan 2001; 271 pp. $24.95 Random House

Michael Pollan reverses the usual humancentric perspective, asking what domestication has meant to the apple tree, the potato, the cannabis plant, and the tulip. He sees our intertwined histories as a coevolutionary partnership in which plants get their genes spread around by exploiting our taste for sweetness, our eye for beauty, and our occasional need to get high.

The Botany of Desire covers fascinating ground, from the tulip-viewing parties of an eighteenth-century Turkish sultan to an Idaho farmer's bitter critique of corporate agriculture.

A passionate gardener, Pollan grew his own genetically-engineered New Leaf potatoes; his treatment of the GM controversy is one of the best, most nuanced I've seen. (John Chapman, the legendary Johnny Appleseed, emerges here as a somehow typically American blend of entrepreneur and mystic, preaching an esoteric gospel as he brought the makings for hard cider to a thirsty frontier. Chapman believed grafting--the orchardist's solution to the complexities of apple genetics--violated a tree's divine essence. You can only imagine his reaction to the idea of adding a silkmoth gene to give apples resistance to fire blight.) --Joe Eaton

"Even evolution evolves. About ten thousand years ago the world witnessed a second flowering of plant diversity that we would come to call, somewhat self-centeredly, "the invention of agriculture." A group of angiosperms refined their basic put-the-animals-to-work strategy to take advantage of one particular animal that had evolved not only to move freely around the earth, but to think and trade complicated thoughts. These plants hit on a remarkably clever strategy: getting us to move and think for them. Now came edible grasses (such as wheat and corn) that induced humans to cut down vast forests to make more room for them; flowers whose beauty would transfix whole cultures; plants so compelling and useful and tasty they would inspire human beings to seed, transport, extol, and even write books about them.

"In the process of changing the land, Chapman also changed the apple--or rather, made it possible for the apple to change itself. If Americans like Chapman had planted only grafted trees--if Americans had eaten rather than drunk their apples--the apple would not have been able to remake itself and thereby adapt to its new home. It was the seeds, and the cider, that gave the apple the opportunity to discover by trial and error the precise combination of traits required to prosper in the New World. From Chapman's vast planting of nameless cider apple seeds came some of the great American cultivars of the nineteenth century.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group