The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world Read Free Page B

staple food). Also, having grown these four plants at one time or another in my own garden, I’m on fairly intimate terms with them. But the real reason I chose these plants and not another four is simpler than that: they have great stories to tell.
    Each of the chapters that follows takes the form of a journey that either starts out, stops by, or ends up in my garden but along the way ventures far afield, both in space and historical time: to seventeenth-century Amsterdam, where, for a brief, perverse moment, the tulip became more precious than gold; to a corporate campus in St. Louis, where genetic engineers are reinventing the potato; and back to Amsterdam, where another, far less lovely flower has made itself, again, more precious than gold. I also travel to potato farms in Idaho; follow my species’ passion for intoxicating plants down through history and into contemporary neuroscience; and paddle a canoe down a river in central Ohio in search of the real Johnny Appleseed. Hoping to render our relationships with these four species in all their complexity, I look at them, by turns, through a variety of lenses: social and natural history, science, journalism, biography, mythology, philosophy, and memoir.
    These are stories, then, about Man and Nature. We’ve been telling ourselves such stories forever, as a way of making sense of what we call our “relationship to nature”—to borrow that curious, revealing phrase. (What other species can even be said to have a “relationship” to nature?) For a long time now, the Man in these stories has gazed at Nature across a gulf of awe or mystery or shame. Even when the tenor of these narratives changes, as it has over time, the gulf remains. There’s the old heroic story, where Man is at war with Nature; the romantic version, where Man merges spiritually with Nature (usually with some help from the pathetic fallacy); and, more recently, the environmental morality tale, in which Nature pays Man back for his transgressions, usually in the coin of disaster—three different narratives (at least), yet all of them share a premise we know to be false but can’t seem to shake: that we somehow stand outside, or apart from, nature.
    This book tells a different kind of story about Man and Nature, one that aims to put us back in the great reciprocal web that is life on Earth. My hope is that by the time you close its covers, things outside (and inside) will look a little different, so that when you see an apple tree across a road or a tulip across a table, it won’t appear quite so alien, so Other. Seeing these plants instead as willing partners in an intimate and reciprocal relationship with us means looking at ourselves a little differently, too: as the objects of other species’ designs and desires, as one of the newer bees in Darwin’s garden—ingenious, sometimes reckless, and remarkably unself-conscious. Think of this book as that bee’s mirror.

CHAPTER 1

Desire: Sweetness

Plant: The Apple
    ( MALUS DOMESTICA )

I f you happened to find yourself on the banks of the Ohio River on a particular afternoon in the spring of 1806—somewhere just to the north of Wheeling, West Virginia, say—you would probably have noticed a strange makeshift craft drifting lazily down the river. At the time, this particular stretch of the Ohio, wide and brown and bounded on both sides by steep shoulders of land thick with oaks and hickories, fairly boiled with river traffic, as a ramshackle armada of keelboats and barges ferried settlers from the comparative civilization of Pennsylvania to the wilderness of the Northwest Territory.
    The peculiar craft you’d have caught sight of that afternoon consisted of a pair of hollowed-out logs that had been lashed together to form a rough catamaran, a sort of canoe plus sidecar. In one of the dugouts lounged the figure of a skinny man of about thirty, who may or may not have been wearing a burlap coffee sack for a shirt and a tin pot for a hat.