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The Botany of Desire

My current leisure reading is "The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-eye view of the world" by Michael Pollan. Pollan is a contributing writer for the NYT Magazine and teaches writing at Berkeley. The book is fascinating. It's not the page turner kind of book that science fiction stories are to me, but still I find myself amazed at what little I knew and still do not know about these four plants: the apple tree, tulip, marijuana, and the potato. Pollan links these four species to some primal human desires---sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control.

There are some really convention-shattering things one will learn. For example, we have all heard of the Johnny Appleseed story, where Johnny lives the carefree life and wanders across America, like a bee, planting precious apple trees that eventually bear sweet red fruit. In fact, Johnny's original intention was to plant apple trees not for fruit, but to make hard cider. Alcohol! That's right. The apple tree planted from a seed is not guaranteed to produce fruit the same as or even similar to the parent tree where the seed came from. Planting the seed is a whole new evolutionary process where the genes get mixed and mashed to produce a new variety of fruit. The parent genetic code can only be exactly copied by cloning or grafting. All the Fuji's we eat today came from a single parent tree, and each of its offspring are clones of it. Many of Johnny's trees produced fruit that were very likely undesirable to our tastes (not sweet enough).

Yet his work was important, notwithstanding the uselessness of the fruit. He brought a socially accepted drink to people's homes in a time where puritanical faith and devoutness reigned. He also ensured the survival of apple trees in north America, which are not native plants.

Each plant species has a little story to tell, and Pollan has done a really good job so far telling it. I was hooked when he challenged the conventional way of looking at our relationship with these plants. We have a tendency as humans to think of plants' existence as serving our needs and purposes. They live in our gardens because we choose to, and we provide their sustenance. But what if we've got it all wrong? What if all along the plants have been subtly drawing our attention to them, and by adapting to feed our desires, ensured the survival of their kind?

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