T.C. Conner

The Write Gardener



Please tune in to your local public television station at 8 p.m. Oct. 28 for a special presentation of “The Botany of Desire,” a film based on Michael Pollan’s best selling book of the same name.

Gardeners will want to take note of the four “desirables” talked about in the film – the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. Having read Pollan’s book, I’m looking forward to seeing what should be a very interesting film about the reciprocal relationship (much overlooked) we have with plants.

Pollan says plants manipulate us: “The truth of the matter is that the flower has cleverly manipulated the bee into hauling its pollen from blossom to blossom.”

And the four plants are given considerable attention by Pollan in his book, and in the two-hour PBS special on Wednesday night. Narrated by Frances McDormand, the program has spectacular cinematography enhanced by the use of high definition photography.

In a press release, producer/director Michael Schwarz says, “The Botany of Desire is a perfect story for television. It takes a world we thought we knew, and allows us to see it in an entirely new way.” Pollan’s musings about such things begins one day in early spring: “On this particular May afternoon,

I happened to be sowing seeds in the neighborhood of a flowering apple tree that was fairly vibrating with bees,” he writes in his book. “And what I found myself thinking about was this: What existential difference is there between the human being’s role in this (or any) garden and the bumblebee’s?”

There are four human desires Pollan associates with the four plants: sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control. Each of the plants and their associated human desire are given a great deal of attention in the book and in the PBS special.

We’re expected to come away with a deeper understanding of how plants “have been working on us – they’ve been using us – for their own purposes” as Pollan puts it. One train of thought Pollan follows has much to do with a coevolutionary existence between plants and animals. “The two parties act on each other to advance their individual interests but wind up trading favors . . .”

The story begins with the apple and Johnny Appleseed (real name – John Chapman). It seems Johnny Appleseed wasn’t really planting the kind of apple tree seeds that produce the sweet apples we’re most familiar with today. You might find it sort of odd that back in the day, a lot of folks were quite fond of apple cider, and I’m not talking about what you find in the cooler at the local grocery stores.

According to Pollan’s research, hard cider made from the sourest apples was the choice drink during the 1800s. What took place over the years that caused the apple to become America’s number one fruit? Pollan says the apple used us to sweeten itself.

And what about beauty? Is it any wonder that the tulip is perhaps the number one spring blooming flower in North America?

The Botany of Desire explains how we might have acquired the ability to see something as being beautiful: “In time the moment of recognition – much like the quickening one feels whenever an object of desire is spotted in the landscape – would become pleasurable, and the signifying thing a thing of beauty.”

The tulip then, proved to be instrumental in helping us form our predilection for flowers. And the more beauty we saw in them, the more beautiful we tried to make them.

What did the flower get from all the attention we lavished upon it? In particular, the rose, orchid, and tulip got a makeover that’s made them top selling flowers season after season.

There are those who consider intoxication a desire. Pollan writes: “There are plants in the garden that manufacture molecules with the power to change the subjective experience of reality we call consciousness.”

Marijuana is one such plant and Pollan wonders “why should evolution yield plants possessing such magic?” It has something do with a plants ability for self-preservation and how it tastes to animals that try to eat it.

If it tastes bitter, or contains a dangerous chemical compound, it usually gets left alone, which means it survives. I suggest reading Pollan’s book, and watching the PBS special, for a very unique look at how the desire of intoxication meshes with plants that have mind-altering compounds.

The fourth desire, control, is associated with the potato. A gardener “eventually learns that every advance in his control of the garden is also an invitation to a new disorder.” What Pollan wants us to recognize is this: biodiversity. What led to the Irish potato famine in the 1840s was the absence of a diverse crop of potatoes. The Irish discovered that one variety of potato, the Lumper, grew so well in their type of soil that they need not grow any other.

Monoculture is still practiced today in Idaho where you’ll see vast fields of one single variety of potato – the ever popular Russet Burbank.

In the epilogue to his book, Pollan ponders the relationship Chapman had with apples, why tulip lovers love their tulips, marijuana growers in Amsterdam, and the Monsanto scientists who wrestle with chemical control methods in plants: “All of them had ventured into the garden – into Darwin’s Ever-Expanding Garden of Artificial Selection – for the purpose of marrying powerful human drives to the equally powerful drives of plants; all were practitioners of the botany of desire.”

As for common gardeners like you and me, Pollan says, “They took it for granted that domestication was something people did to plants, never the other way around.”

I had the privilege of viewing The Botany of Desire in advance of the date it’s set to air. I came away with a fresh perspective on what it means to be a gardener.

I’m sure you’ll be entertained and enlightened, you might even discover that you’ve been a botanist of desire ever since the day you planted your first flower.



T.C. Conner is a Master Gardener and columnist and columnist for Allied News. He can be reached at tc@thewritegardener.com. Check out his blog at http://thewritegardener.blogspot.com. Column published in Allied News Oct. 21. Pick up a copy at 201A Erie St., Grove City.