The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (2 page)

By the same token, we’re prone to overestimate our own agency in nature. Many of the activities humans like to think they undertake for their own good purposes—inventing agriculture, outlawing certain plants, writing books in praise of others—are mere contingencies as far as nature is concerned. Our desires are simply more grist for evolution’s mill, no different from a change in the weather: a peril for some species, an opportunity for others. Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That’s why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees.

• • •

When Charles Darwin was writing
The Origin of Species
, deciding how best to spring his outlandish idea of natural selection on the world, he settled on a curious rhetorical strategy. Rather than open the book with an account of his new theory, he began with a side subject he judged people (and perhaps English gardeners in particular) would have an easier time getting their heads around. Darwin devoted the first chapter of
The Origin of Species
to a special case of natural selection called “artificial selection”—his term for the process by which domesticated species come into the world. Darwin was using the word artificial not as in fake but as in artifact: a thing reflecting human will. There’s nothing fake about a hybrid rose or a butter pear, a cocker spaniel or a show pigeon.

These were a few of the domesticated species Darwin wrote about in his opening chapter, demonstrating how in each case the species proposes a wealth of variation from which humans then select the traits that will be passed down to future generations. In the special realm of domestication, Darwin explained, human desire (sometimes consciously, sometimes not) plays the same role that blind nature does everywhere else, determining what constitutes “fitness” and thereby leading, over time, to the emergence of new forms of life. The evolutionary rules are the same (“modification by descent”), but Darwin understood that they’d be easier to follow in the story of the tea rose than the sea turtle, in the setting of the garden than the Galápagos.

In the years since Darwin published
The Origin of Species
, the crisp conceptual line that divided artificial from natural selection has blurred. Whereas once humankind exerted its will in the relatively small arena of artificial selection (the arena I think of, metaphorically, as a garden) and nature held sway everywhere else, today the force of our presence is felt everywhere. It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins. We are shaping the evolutionary weather in ways Darwin could never have foreseen; indeed, even the weather itself is in some sense an artifact now, its temperatures and storms the reflection of our actions. For a great many species today, “fitness” means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force. Artificial selection has become a much more important chapter in natural history as it has moved into the space once ruled exclusively by natural selection.

That space, which is the one we often call “the wild,” was never quite as innocent of our influence as we like to think; the Mohawks and Delawares had left their marks on the Ohio wilderness long before John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) showed up and began planting apple trees. Yet even the dream of such a space has become hard to sustain in a time of global warming, ozone holes, and technologies that allow us to modify life at the genetic level—one of the wild’s last redoubts. Partly by default, partly by design, all of nature is now in the process of being domesticated—of coming, or finding itself, under the (somewhat leaky) roof of civilization. Indeed, even the wild now depends on civilization for its survival.

Nature’s success stories from now on are probably going to look a lot more like the apple’s than the panda’s or white leopard’s. If those last two species have a future, it will be because of human desire; strangely enough, their survival now depends on what amounts to a form of artificial selection. This is the world in which we, along with Earth’s other creatures, now must make our uncharted way.

This book takes place in that world; consider it a set of dispatches from Darwin’s ever-expanding garden of artificial selection. Its main characters are four of that world’s success stories. The dogs, cats, and horses of the plant world, these domesticated species are familiar to everyone, so deeply woven into the fabric of our everyday lives that we scarcely think of them as “species” or parts of “nature” at all. But why is that? I suspect it’s at least partly the fault of the word. “Domestic” implies that these species have come in or been brought under civilization’s roof, which is true enough; yet the house-y metaphor encourages us to think that by doing so they have, like us, somehow
left
nature, as if nature were something that only happens outside.

This is simply another failure of imagination: nature is not only to be found “out there”; it is also “in here,” in the apple and the potato, in the garden and the kitchen, even in the brain of a man beholding the beauty of a tulip or inhaling the smoke from a burning cannabis flower. My wager is that when we can find nature in these sorts of places as readily as we now find it in the wild, we’ll have traveled a considerable distance toward understanding our place in the world in the fullness of its complexity and ambiguity.

I’ve chosen the apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato for several logical-sounding reasons. One is that they represent four important classes of domesticated plants (a fruit, a flower, a drug plant, and a 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. According to the man in Jefferson County who deemed the scene worth recording, the fellow in the canoe appeared to be snoozing without a care in the world, evidently trusting in the river to take him wherever it was he wanted to go. The other hull, his sidecar, was riding low in the water under the weight of a small mountain of seeds that had been carefully blanketed with moss and mud to keep them from drying out in the sun.

The fellow snoozing in the canoe was John Chapman, already well known to people in Ohio by his nickname: Johnny Appleseed. He was on his way to Marietta, where the Muskingum River pokes a big hole into the Ohio’s northern bank, pointing straight into the heart of the Northwest Territory. Chapman’s plan was to plant a tree nursery along one of that river’s as-yet-unsettled tributaries, which drain the fertile, thickly forested hills of central Ohio as far north as Mansfield. In all likelihood, Chapman was coming from Allegheny County in western Pennsylvania, to which he returned each year to collect apple seeds, separating them out from the fragrant mounds of pomace that rose by the back door of every cider mill. A single bushel of apple seeds would have been enough to plant more than three hundred thousand trees; there’s no way of telling how many bushels of seed Chapman had in tow that day, but it’s safe to say his catamaran was bearing several whole orchards into the wilderness.

The image of John Chapman and his heap of apple seeds riding together down the Ohio has stayed with me since I first came across it a few years ago in an out-of-print biography. The scene, for me, has the resonance of myth—a myth about how plants and people learned to use each other, each doing for the other things they could not do for themselves, in the bargain changing each other and improving their common lot.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote that “it is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man,” and much of the American chapter of that story can be teased out of Chapman’s story. It’s the story of how pioneers like him helped domesticate the frontier by seeding it with Old World plants. “Exotics,” we’re apt to call these species today in disparagement, yet without them the American wilderness might never have become a home. What did the apple get in return? A golden age: untold new varieties and half a world of new habitat.

As an emblem of the marriage between people and plants, the design of Chapman’s peculiar craft strikes me as just right, implying as it does a relation of parity and reciprocal exchange between its two passengers. More than most of us do, Chapman seems to have had a knack for looking at the world from the plants’ point of view—“pomocentrically,” you might say. He understood he was working for the apples as much as they were working for him. Perhaps that’s why he sometimes likened himself to a bumblebee, and why he would rig up his boat the way he did. Instead of towing his shipment of seeds behind him, Chapman lashed the two hulls together so they would travel down the river side by side.

We give ourselves altogether too much credit in our dealings with other species. Even the power over nature that domestication supposedly represents is overstated. It takes two to perform that particular dance, after all, and plenty of plants and animals have elected to sit it out. Try as they might, people have never been able to domesticate the oak tree, whose highly nutritious acorns remain far too bitter for humans to eat. Evidently the oak has such a satisfactory arrangement with the squirrel—which obligingly forgets where it has buried every fourth acorn or so (admittedly, the estimate is Beatrix Potter’s)—that the tree has never needed to enter into any kind of formal arrangement with us.

The apple has been far more eager to do business with humans, and perhaps nowhere more so than in America. Like generations of other immigrants before and after, the apple has made itself at home here. In fact, the apple did such a convincing job of this that most of us wrongly assume the plant is a native. (Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, who knew a thing or two about natural history, called it “the American fruit.”) Yet there is a sense—a biological, not just metaphorical sense—in which this is, or has become, true, for the apple transformed itself when it came to America. Bringing boatloads of seed onto the frontier, Johnny Appleseed had a lot to do with that process, but so did the apple itself. No mere passenger or dependent, the apple is the hero of its own story.

• • •

On a summery October afternoon almost two hundred years later, I found myself on the bank of the Ohio River a few miles south of Steubenville, Ohio, at the exact spot where John Chapman is thought to have set foot in the Northwest Territory for the first time. I’d come here to look for him, or at least that’s what I thought I was doing. I wanted to find out what I could about the “real” Johnny Appleseed, the historical figure behind the Disneyfied folk hero, as well as about the apples in whose story Chapman played such a pivotal role. I figured it would be a modest piece of historical detective work: I’d track down the sites of Chapman’s orchards, follow his footsteps (and canoe wake) from western Pennsylvania through central Ohio into Indiana, see if maybe I could find one of the trees he planted. And I did all that, though I’m not sure it got me that much closer to the
real
John Chapman, a man who by now has been composted beneath a deep sift of myth and legend and wishful thinking. I did find another Johnny Appleseed, however, as well as another apple, both of which had been lost.

Actually, the apples and the man have suffered a similar fate in the years since they journeyed down the Ohio together in Chapman’s double-hulled canoe. Both then had the tang of strangeness about them, and both have long since been sweetened beyond recognition. Figures of tart wildness, both have been thoroughly domesticated—Chapman transformed into a benign Saint Francis of the American frontier, the apple into a blemish-free plastic-red saccharine orb. “Sweetness without dimension” is how one pomologist memorably described the Red Delicious; the same might be said of the Johnny Appleseed promulgated by Walt Disney and several generations of American children’s book writers. In both cases a cheap, fake sweetness has been substituted for the real thing, though it would take me a while to figure out exactly what that was—the strong desire that bound them one to the other, and to the country that took them in.

• • •

Of the man lounging in the two-hulled canoe, Robert Price, his biographer, wrote that he “had the thick bark of queerness on him.” Indeed. A man with no fixed address his entire adult life, Chapman preferred to spend his nights out of doors; one winter he set up house in a hollowed-out sycamore stump outside Defiance, Ohio, where he operated a pair of nurseries. A vegetarian living on the frontier, he deemed it a cruelty to ride a horse or chop down a tree; he once punished his own foot for squashing a worm by throwing away its shoe. He liked best the company of Indians and children—and rumors trailed him to the effect that he’d once been engaged to marry a ten-year-old girl, who’d broken his heart. Price feels compelled to assure his readers that Chapman “was not a
complete
crank.” The emphasis is mine.

I’d brought a copy of Price’s 1954 biography with me to Ohio, and I relied on its maps to retrace Appleseed’s annual migration from western Pennsylvania, in search of seeds, to his far-flung properties in Ohio and, eventually, Indiana. It was Price’s account that had led me to the spot where Chapman first crossed the river into Ohio, in a faded, microscopic burg to the south of Steubenville called Brilliant.

It had taken me a while to find the landmark mentioned in Price’s book, a stream that emptied into the Ohio called George’s Run. No one in Brilliant seemed to have heard of it. Eventually I discovered that the stream had long since been rerouted through a culvert. Today George’s Run flows, unseen, through a concrete pipe, passes a used-car dealership, crosses beneath a savagely potholed street, and finally reemerges from the earth halfway down a steep, littered embankment behind a convenience store. From there it contributes its meager trickle to the Ohio.

The residents of Brilliant had urged Chapman to stay and plant a nursery, but by his lights the place was already overdeveloped. Ever since he’d come west from Longmeadow, Massachusetts, in 1797, at the age of twenty-three, Chapman had shied away from settled places, for reasons of both temperament and business. To people in Brilliant, Chapman explained that he preferred to get out ahead of the settlers moving west, and this would become the pattern of his life: planting a nursery on a tract of wilderness he judged ripe for settlement and then waiting. By the time the settlers arrived, he’d have apple trees ready to sell them. In time he would find a local boy to look after his trees, move on, and start the process all over again. By the 1830s John Chapman was operating a chain of nurseries that reached all the way from western Pennsylvania through central Ohio and into Indiana. It was in Fort Wayne that Chapman died in 1845—wearing the infamous coffee sack, some say, yet leaving an estate that included some 1,200 acres of prime real estate. The barefoot crank died a wealthy man.

Sketchy though they were, the biographical facts were enough to make anyone question the saintly Golden Books version of Johnny Appleseed (the child bride?!), but it was a single botanical fact about the seeds themselves that made me realize that his story had been lost, and probably on purpose. The fact, simply, is this: apples don’t “come true” from seeds—that is, an apple tree grown from a seed will be a wildling bearing little resemblance to its parent. Anyone who wants edible apples plants grafted trees, for the fruit of seedling apples is almost always inedible—“sour enough,” Thoreau once wrote, “to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.” Thoreau claimed to like the taste of such apples, but most of his countrymen judged them good for little but hard cider—and hard cider was the fate of most apples grown in America up until Prohibition. Apples were something people drank. The reason people in Brilliant wanted John Chapman to stay and plant a nursery was the same reason he would soon be welcome in every cabin in Ohio: Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier.

The identification of the apple with notions of health and wholesomeness turns out to be a modern invention, part of a public relations campaign dreamed up by the apple industry in the early 1900s to reposition a fruit that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had declared war on. Carry Nation’s hatchet, it seems, was meant not just for saloon doors but for chopping down the very apple trees John Chapman had planted by the millions. That hatchet—or at least Prohibition—is probably responsible for the bowdlerizing of Chapman’s story. Johnny Appleseed was revered on the frontier for a great many admirable qualities: he was a philanthropist, a healer, an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism), a peacemaker with the Indians. Yet as I looked out at the sluggish brown Ohio sliding west, trying to picture the man in rags riding alongside his cargo of cider seeds, I wondered if all the cultural energy spent painting Chapman as a Christian saint wasn’t really just an attempt to domesticate a far stranger, more pagan hero. Maybe in Ohio I could catch a glimpse of his former wildness. His and the apple’s both.

• • •

Slice an apple through at its equator, and you will find five small chambers arrayed in a perfectly symmetrical starburst—a pentagram. Each of the chambers holds a seed (occasionally two) of such a deep lustrous brown they might have been oiled and polished by a woodworker. Two facts about these seeds are worth noting. First, they contain a small quantity of cyanide, probably a defense the apple evolved to discourage animals from biting into them; they’re almost indescribably bitter.

The second, more important fact about those seeds concerns their genetic contents, which are likewise full of surprises. Every seed in that apple, not to mention every seed riding down the Ohio alongside John Chapman, contains the genetic instructions for a completely new and different apple tree, one that, if planted, would bear only the most glancing resemblance to its parents. If not for grafting—the ancient technique of cloning trees—every apple in the world would be its own distinct variety, and it would be impossible to keep a good one going beyond the life span of that particular tree. In the case of the apple, the fruit nearly always falls far from the tree.

The botanical term for this variability is “heterozygosity,” and while there are many species that share it (our own included), in the apple the tendency is extreme. More than any other single trait, it is the apple’s genetic variability—its ineluctable wildness—that accounts for its ability to make itself at home in places as different from one another as New England and New Zealand, Kazakhstan and California. Wherever the apple tree goes, its offspring propose so many different variations on what it means to be an apple—at least five per apple, several thousand per tree—that a couple of these novelties are almost bound to have whatever qualities it takes to prosper in the tree’s adopted home.

• • •

Exactly where the apple started out from has long been a matter of contention among people who have studied these things, but it appears that the ancestor of
Malus domestica
—the domesticated apple—is a wild apple that grows in the mountains of Kazakhstan. In some places there,
Malus sieversii,
as it’s known to botanists, is the dominant species in the forest, growing to a height of sixty feet and throwing off each fall a cornucopia of odd, applelike fruits ranging in size from marbles to softballs, in color from yellow and green to red and purple. I’ve tried to imagine what May in such a forest must look—and smell!—like, or October, with the forest floor a nubby carpet of reds and golds and greens.