The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World

Michael Pollan’s 2001 nonfiction book, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, asks the reader to stop considering only the human point of view of nature and to take the perspective of the plants themselves. He writes about how humans have affected the evolution of plants and in turn plants have affected our evolution as well. To Pollan, humans are much like the bumblebee in that we rely on plants as much as they rely on us, and we have gone through the process of co-evolution together. To prove his point, he selects four plants that have embodied important desires to humans and tells the story of our co-evolution with these plants.

The first chapter is about the apple, which has long appealed to the human desire for sweetness. Pollan traces the travels of John Chapman, a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed, and seeks to separate truth from myth. He finds that Chapman’s trees were important sources of seeds, which were used not to grow fruit for consumption but for making cider. Chapman was a kind of spirit of the woods, a frontiersman who was at home with the Indians and who united the wild and the domestic.