The Botany of Desire
By Michael Pollan
So the question arose in my mind that day: Did I choose to plant these potatoes, or did the potato make me do it? In fact, both statements are true. I can remember the exact moment that spud seduced me, showing off its knobby charms in the pages of a seed catalog. I think it was the tasty-sounding "buttery yellow flesh" that did it. This was a trivial, semiconscious event; it never occurred to me that our catalog encounter was of any evolutionary consequence whatsoever. Yet evolution consists of an infinitude of trivial, unconscious events, and in the evolution of the potato my reading of a particular seed catalog on a particular January evening counts as one of them.
That May afternoon, the garden suddenly appeared before me in a whole new light, the manifold delights it offered to the eye and nose and tongue no longer quite so innocent or passive. All these plants, which Iıd always regarded as the objects of my desire, were also, I realized, subjects, acting on me, getting me to do things for them they couldnıt do for themselves.
And thatıs when I had the idea: What would happen if we looked at the world beyond the garden this way, regarded our place in nature from the same upside-down perspective?
This book attempts to do just that, by telling the story of four familiar plants that link their destinies to our own. Its broader subject is the complex reciprocal relationship between the human and the natural world, which I approach from a somewhat unconventional angle: I take seriously the plantıs point of view.
