The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (8 page)

This is why the Geneva orchard is a museum. “Today’s commercial apples represent only a small fraction of the
Malus
gene pool,” Phil Forsline, its curator, told me as we walked to a far corner of the orchard, where there was something unusual he wanted me to see. Forsline is a gangly horticulturist in his fifties with striking Nordic blue eyes and sandy hair starting to gray. “A century ago there were several thousand different varieties of apples in commerce; now most of the apples we grow have the same five or six parents: Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Jonathan, Macintosh, and Cox’s Orange Pippin. Breeders keep going back to the same well, and it’s getting shallower.”

Forsline has devoted a career to preserving and expanding the apple’s genetic diversity. He’s convinced that the modern history of the apple—particularly the practice of growing a dwindling handful of cloned varieties in vast orchards—has rendered it less fit as a plant, which is one reason modern apples require more pesticide than any other food crop. Forsline explained why this is so.

In the wild a plant and its pests are continually coevolving, in a dance of resistance and conquest that can have no ultimate victor. But coevolution ceases in an orchard of grafted trees, since they are genetically identical from generation to generation. The problem very simply is that the apple trees no longer reproduce sexually, as they do when they’re grown from seed, and sex is nature’s way of creating fresh genetic combinations. At the same time the viruses, bacteria, fungi, and insects keep very much at it, reproducing sexually and continuing to evolve until eventually they hit on the precise genetic combination that allows them to overcome whatever resistance the apples may have once possessed. Suddenly total victory is in the pests’ sight—unless, that is, people come to the tree’s rescue, wielding the tools of modern chemistry.

Put another way, the domestication of the apple has gone too far, to the point where the species’ fitness for life in nature (where it still has to live, after all) has been dangerously compromised. Reduced to the handful of genetically identical clones that suit our taste and agricultural practice, the apple has lost the crucial variability—the wildness—that sexual reproduction confers.

“The solution is for us to help the apple evolve artificially,” Forsline explained, by introducing fresh genes through breeding. A century and a half after John Chapman and others like him seeded the New World with apples, underwriting the orgy of apple sex that led to the myriad new varieties represented in this orchard, another genetic reshuffling may now be necessary. Which is precisely why it is so important to preserve as many different apple genes as possible.

“It’s a question of biodiversity,” Forsline said as we walked down the long rows of antique apples, tasting as we talked. I was accustomed to thinking of biodiversity in terms of wild species, but of course the biodiversity of the domestic species on which we depend—and which now depend on us—is no less important. Every time an old apple variety drops out of cultivation, a set of genes—which is to say a set of qualities of taste and color and texture, as well as of hardiness and pest resistance—vanishes from the earth.

The greatest biodiversity of any species is typically found in the place where it first evolved—where nature first experimented with all the possibilities of what an apple, or a potato or peach, could be. In the case of the apple, the “center of diversity,” as botanists call such a place, lies in Kazakhstan, and in the last few years Forsline has been working to preserve the wild apple genes that he and his colleagues have gathered in the Kazakh forests. Forsline has made several trips to the area, bringing back thousands of seeds and cuttings that he has planted in two long rows all the way in the back of the Geneva orchard. It was these trees, apples far older and wilder than any planted by Johnny Appleseed, that Forsline wanted to show me.

• • •

It was Nikolai Vavilov, the great Russian botanist, who first identified the wild apple’s Eden in the forests around Alma-Ata, in Kazakhstan, in 1929. (This wouldn’t have come as news to the locals, however: Alma-Ata means “father of the apple.”) “All around the city one could see a vast expanse of wild apples covering the foothills,” he wrote. “One could see with his own eyes that this beautiful site was the origin of the cultivated apple.” Vavilov eventually fell victim to Stalin’s wholesale repudiation of genetics, starving to death in a Leningrad prison in 1943, and his discovery was lost to science until the fall of communism. In 1989, one of Vavilov’s last surviving students, a botanist named Aimak Djangaliev, invited a group of American plant scientists to see the wild apples he had been studying, very quietly, during the long years of Soviet rule. Djangaliev was already eighty, and he wanted the Americans’ help to save the wild stands of
Malus sieversii
from a wave of real estate development spreading out from Alma-Ata to the surrounding hills.

Forsline and his colleagues were astonished to find entire forests of apples, three-hundred-year-old trees fifty feet tall and as big around as oaks, some of them bearing apples as large and red as modern cultivated varieties. “Even in the towns, apple trees were coming up in the cracks of the sidewalks,” he recalled. “You looked at these apples and felt sure you were looking at the ancestor of the Golden Delicious or the Macintosh.” Forsline determined to save as much of this germ plasm as possible. He felt certain that somewhere among the wild apples of Kazakhstan could be found genes for disease and pest resistance, as well as apple qualities beyond our imagining. Since the wild apple’s survival in the wild was now in doubt, he collected hundreds of thousands of seeds, planted as many as he had space for in Geneva, and then offered the rest to researchers and breeders around the world. “I’ll send seeds to anybody who asks, just so long as they promise to plant them, tend to the trees, and then report back someday.” The wild apples had found their Johnny Appleseed.

• • •

And then there they were, two extravagantly jumbled rows of the weirdest apples I’d ever laid eyes on. The trees had been crammed in cheek by jowl, and the aisles could barely contain, much less order, the luxuriant riot of foliage and fruit, even though it had been planted only six years before. I’d never seen an orchard of apple seedlings (few people nowadays ever do), though it’s hard to imagine another seedling orchard quite so crazed by diversity. Forsline had told me that all the apple genes heretofore brought to America—all the genes floating down the Ohio River alongside John Chapman—represented maybe a tenth of the entire
Malus
genome. Well, here was the rest of it.

No two of these trees looked even remotely alike, not in form or leaf or fruit. Some grew straight for the sun, others trailed along the ground or formed low shrubs or simply petered out, the upstate New York climate not to their liking. I saw apples with leaves like those of linden trees, others shaped like demented forsythia bushes. Maybe a third of the trees were bearing fruit—but strange, strange fruit that looked and tasted like God’s first drafts of what an apple could be.

I saw apples with the hue and heft of olives and cherries alongside glowing yellow Ping-Pong balls and dusky purple berries. I saw a whole assortment of baseballs, oblate and conic and perfectly round, some of them bright as infield grass, others dull as wood. And I picked big, shiny red fruits that looked just like apples, of all things, though their taste . . . their taste was something else again. Imagine sinking your teeth into a tart potato or a slightly mushy Brazil nut covered in leather. On first bite some of these apples would start out with high promise on the tongue—Now,
here’s
an apple!—only to suddenly veer into a bitterness so profound it makes my stomach rise even in recollection.

To get the taste off my tongue, I made for a more civilized row nearby and picked something edible—a Jonagold, I think it was, a cross of Golden Delicious and Jonathan that is to my thinking one of the great achievements of modern apple breeding. And what an achievement that is, to transform a tart potato into a delight of the human eye and tongue. This whole orchard is a testament to the magic arts of domestication, our knack—our Dionysian knack—for marrying the wildest fruits of nature to the various desires of culture. Yet as the modern apple’s story suggests, domestication can be overdone, the human quest to control nature’s wildness can go too far. To domesticate another species is to bring it under culture’s roof, but when people rely on too few genes for too long, a plant loses its ability to get along on its own, outdoors. Something like that happened to the potato in Ireland in the 1840s, and it may be happening to the apple right now.

What saved the potato from that particular blight was genes for resistance that scientists eventually found in wild potatoes growing in the Andes, the potato’s own center of diversity. Yet we live in a world where the wild places wild plants live are dwindling. What happens when the wild potatoes and wild apples are gone? The best technology in the world can’t create a new gene or re-create one that’s been lost. That’s why Phil Forsline has dedicated himself to saving and spreading all manner of apples, good, bad, indifferent, and, above all, wild, before it’s too late. And that’s why all the other sowers of wild seeds, all those who labor under the sign of John Chapman, are to be prized, even if they do blow it now and again, disseminating along with all their good apples the occasional stinking fennel. In the best of all possible worlds we’d be preserving the wild places themselves—the apple’s home in the Kazakh wilderness, for instance. The next best world, though, is the one that preserves the quality of wildness itself, if only because it is upon wildness—of all things!—that domestication depends. That’s news to us, perhaps, though Johnny Appleseed was there a century before the scientists and Dionysus a few millennia before him. But how lucky for us that wildness survives in a seed and can be cultivated—can flourish even in the straight lines and right angles of an orchard. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Thoreau once wrote; a century later, when many of the wild places are no more, Wendell Berry has proposed this necessary corollary: “In human culture is the preservation of wildness.”

• • •

A handful of wild apples came home with me from Geneva, a couple of big red ones that caught my eye and a tiny round one no bigger than an olive. This last oddball sat on my desk for a few weeks, and when it started to wrinkle I sliced it through with a knife and scratched out the pippins—five polished ebony seeds that held inside them unimaginable apple mysteries. Who knows what sort of apple would come of such seeds, or of
their
seeds in turn, after the bees crossed their genes with the genes of the Baldwins and Macs in my garden? Probably not an apple you’d want to eat or even look at. But who can say for sure? It was a ridiculous bet, I’ll admit, but I decided to give one of the wild apple seeds a spot in my garden anyway—in honor of John Chapman, I suppose, but also just to see what happens.

Though it may not be realistic to expect a sweet apple ever to come of this wildling, I would be surprised if it didn’t add something to my garden—if it didn’t in some way make it a sweeter place than it is now. Imagine it, this rank, strangely formed tree growing up in a garden, of all places, applelike, perhaps, yet like no apple ever seen and bearing each fall a harvest of strange, unrecognizable fruits. In the middle of a garden—in the middle of a landscape, that is, expressly designed to answer our desires—what such a tree will mostly bear is witness, to an unreconstructed and necessary wildness.

Wallace Stevens wrote a poem about the power of a simple jar sitting on a hill in Tennessee to transform the surrounding forest. He described how this very ordinary bit of human artifice “took dominion everywhere,” ordering the “slovenly wilderness” around it like a light in the darkness. I wonder if a wild tree planted in the middle of an ordered landscape can make the reverse happen, can unstring this taut garden, I mean, and allow the cultivated plants all around it to sound the clear note of their own inborn wildness, now muffled. There can be no civilization without wildness, such a tree would remind us, no sweetness absent its astringent opposite.

This garden of mine is bordered by a dwindling contingent of ancient, twisted Baldwins, planted in the twenties by the farmer who built the place and fermented by him, local legend has it, into the tastiest, most potent applejack in town. If nothing else, my aboriginal Kazakh apple tree, growing up in the midst of these, its named and cultivated descendants, will make those old Baldwins taste sweeter than they do now. And if I ever do get around to making a barrel of cider from my Baldwins, a few of these nameless wild apples should add a sharp and racy note to the drink, a strangeness I’ll be looking for, and welcome.

CHAPTER 2

Desire: Beauty

Plant: The Tulip

(
TULIPA
)

T
he tulip was my first flower, or at least the first flower I ever planted, though for a long time afterward I was blind to its hard, glamorous beauty. I was maybe ten at the time, and it wasn’t until my forties that I could really look at a tulip again. One reason for the long hiatus—for all those years of missed looking—had something to do with the particular tulips I planted as a kid. They would have to have been Triumphs, the tall, blunt, gaily colored orbs you see (or just as often fail to see) massed in the spring landscape like so many blobs of pigment on a stick. Like the other canonical flowers—the rose or the peony, say—the tulip has been reinvented every century or so to reflect our shifting ideals of beauty, and for the tulip the story of the twentieth century has mainly been the rise and triumph of all this mass-produced eye candy.

Every fall my parents would buy mesh bags of these bulbs, assortments of twenty-five or fifty to the bag, and pay me a few pennies per bulb to bury them in the pachysandra. Presumably they were after something woodsy and naturalistic, which was why they could entrust tulip planting to a ten-year-old boy, whose haphazard and desultory approach was apt to yield exactly the desired effect. I’d press and twist the bulb planter into the root-congested earth until the heel of my hand whitened into a pillowy blister, keeping careful count as I worked, translating the climbing tally of bulbs into the coin of penny candy or trading cards.

October’s investment of effort reliably yielded the interest of spring’s first color—or perhaps I should say first important color, since the daffodils came earlier. But yellow, besides being commonplace in spring, barely qualifies as a color to a child; red or purple or pink,
those
were colors, and tulips could incarnate them all. This being the early days of the space program, the sturdy tulip stalks reminded me of rockets poised for launch beneath their fat, parti-colored payloads.

These tulips were definitely flowers for kids. They were the simplest of any to draw, and the straightforward spectrum of colors they came in never failed to toe the Crayola line. Accessible and uncomplicated, these run-of-the-garden-center tulips circa 1965 couldn’t have been easier for a child to grasp or to grow. But they were easy to grow out of, too, and by the time I was calling the shots in my own garden, a narrow bed of vegetables pressed up against the foundation of our ranch house, I was done with tulips. I thought of myself as a young farmer now and had no time for anything so frivolous as a flower.

• • •

Three and a half centuries earlier, the tulip, still fairly new to the West, unleashed a brief, collective madness that shook a whole nation and nearly brought its economy to ruin. Never before or since has a flower—
a flower!
—taken a star turn on history’s main stage as it did in Holland between 1634 and 1637. All that remains of this episode, a speculative frenzy that sucked people at every level of society into its whorl, is a neologism—“tulipomania”—that’s not had to be dusted off in all the centuries since, and a historical puzzle. Why there?—in that stolid, parsimonious, Calvinist nation. Why then?—at a time of general prosperity. And why this particular flower?—cool, scentless, and somewhat aloof, the tulip is one of the least Dionysian of flowers, far more likely to elicit admiration than excite passion.

Though something tells me the Triumphs I planted in my parents’ pachysandra differed in some key respects from Semper Augustus. Semper Augustus was the intricately feathered red-and-white tulip one bulb of which changed hands for ten thousand guilders at the height of the mania, a sum that at the time would have bought one of the grandest canal houses in Amsterdam. Semper Augustus is gone from nature, though I have seen paintings of it (the Dutch would commission portraits of venerable tulips they couldn’t afford to buy), and beside a Semper Augustus a modern tulip looks like a toy.

These are the two poles I want to travel between in these pages: my boyish view of the pointlessness of flowers and the unreasonable passion for them that the Dutch briefly epitomized. The boy’s-eye view has the wintry weight of rationality on its side: all this useless beauty is impossible to justify on cost-benefit grounds. But then, isn’t that always how it is with beauty? Overboard as the Dutch would eventually go, the fact is that the rest of us—that is, most of humankind for most of its history—have been in the same irrational boat as the seventeenth-century Dutch: crazy for flowers. So what is this tropism all about, for us
and
for the flowers? How did these organs of plant sex manage to get themselves cross-wired with human ideas of value and status and Eros? And what might our ancient attraction for flowers have to teach us about the deeper mysteries of beauty—what one poet has called “this grace wholly gratuitous”? Is that what it is? Or does beauty have a purpose? The story of the tulip—one of the most beloved of flowers, yet a flower curiously hard to love—seems like a good place to search for answers to such questions. Owing to the nature of its object, this particular search doesn’t unfold along a straight line. A beeline is more like it—a
real
beeline, though, one that makes a great many stops along its way.

• • •

It is possible to be indifferent to flowers—possible but not very likely. Psychiatrists regard a patient’s indifference to flowers as a symptom of clinical depression. It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person’s mind, that mind’s connection to the sensual world has grown dangerously frayed. Such a condition stands as the polar opposite of tulipomania; “floraennui,” you might call it. It is a syndrome that afflicts individuals, however, not societies.

To judge from my own experience, boys of a certain age also couldn’t care less about flowers, regardless of their mental health. For me, fruits and vegetables were the only things to grow, even those vegetables you couldn’t pay me to eat. I approached gardening as a form of alchemy, a quasi-magical system for transforming seeds and soil and water and sunlight into things of value, and as long as you couldn’t grow toys or LPs, that more or less meant groceries. (I operated a modest farm stand, patronized exclusively by my mother.) To me then (even now), beauty was the breath-catching sight of a glossy bell pepper hanging like a Christmas ornament, or a watermelon nested in a tangle of vines. (Later, briefly, I felt the same way about the five-fingered leaves of a marijuana plant, but that’s a special case.) Flowers were all right if you had the space, but what was the point? The flowers I welcomed into my garden were precisely the ones that
had
a point, that foretold the fruit to come: the pretty white-and-yellow button of a strawberry blossom that soon would swell and redden, the ungainly yellow trumpet that heralded the zucchini’s coming. Teleological flowers, you might call them.

The other kind, flowers for flowers’ sake, seemed to me the flimsiest of things, barely a step up from leaves, which I also deemed of little value; neither ever achieved the sheer existential heft of a tomato or cucumber. The only time I liked tulips was right before they opened, when the flower still formed a closed capsule that resembled some sort of marvelous, weighted fruit. But the day the petals flexed, the mystery drained out of them, leaving behind what to me seemed a weak, papery insubstantiality.

But then, I was ten. What did I know about beauty?

• • •

Aside from certain unimaginative boys, the clinically depressed, and one other exception I will get to, the beauty of flowers has been taken for granted by people for as long as people have been leaving records of what they considered beautiful. Among the treasures the Egyptians made sure the dead had with them on their journey into eternity were the blossoms of flowers, several of which have been found in the pyramids, miraculously preserved. The equation of flowers and beauty was apparently made by all the great civilizations of antiquity, though some—notably the Jews and early Christians—set themselves against the celebration and use of flowers. But it wasn’t out of blindness to their beauty that Jews and Christians discouraged flowers; to the contrary, devotion to flowers posed a challenge to monotheism, was a bright ember of pagan nature worship that needed to be smothered. Incredibly, there were no flowers in Eden—or, more likely, the flowers were weeded out of Eden when Genesis was written down.

This world-historical consensus about the beauty of flowers, which seems so right and uncontroversial to us, is remarkable when you consider that there are relatively few things in nature whose beauty people haven’t had to invent. Sunrise, the plumage of birds, the human face and form, and flowers: there may be a few more, but not many. Mountains were ugly until just a few centuries ago (“warts on the earth,” Donne had called them, in an echo of the general consensus); forests were the “hideous” haunts of Satan until the Romantics rehabilitated them. Flowers have had their poets too, but they never needed them in quite the same way.

According to Jack Goody, an English anthropologist who has studied the role of flowers in most of the world’s cultures—East and West, past and present—the love of flowers is almost, but not quite, universal. The “not quite” refers to Africa, where, Goody writes in
The Culture of Flowers,
flowers play almost no part in religious observance or everyday social ritual. (The exceptions are those parts of Africa that came into early contact with other civilizations—the Islamic north, for example.) Africans seldom grow domesticated flowers, and flower imagery seldom shows up in African art or religion. Apparently when Africans speak or write about flowers, it is usually with an eye to the promise of fruit rather than the thing itself.

Goody offers two possible explanations for the absence of a culture of flowers in Africa, one economic, the other ecological. The economic explanation is that people can’t afford to pay attention to flowers until they have enough to eat; a well-developed culture of flowers is a luxury that most of Africa historically has not been able to support. The other explanation is that the ecology of Africa doesn’t offer a lot of flowers, or at least not a lot of showy ones. Relatively few of the world’s domesticated flowers have come from Africa, and the range of flower species on the continent is nowhere near as extensive as it is in, say, Asia or even North America. What flowers one does encounter on the savanna, for example, tend to bloom briefly and then vanish for the duration of the dry season.

I’m not sure exactly what to make of the African case, and neither is Goody. Could it mean that the beauty of flowers is in fact in the eye of the beholder—is something people have constructed, like the sublimity of mountains or the spiritual lift we feel in a forest? If so, why did so many different peoples invent it in so many different times and places? More likely, the African case is simply the exception that proves the rule. As Goody points out, Africans quickly adopted a culture of flowers wherever others introduced it. Maybe the love of flowers is a predilection all people share, but it’s one that cannot itself flower until conditions are ripe—until there are lots of flowers around and enough leisure to stop and smell them.

• • •

Let’s say we
are
born with such a predisposition—that humans, like bees, are drawn instinctively to flowers. It’s obvious what good it does bees to be born liking flowers, but what conceivable benefit could such a predilection offer people?

Some evolutionary psychologists have proposed an interesting answer. Their hypothesis can’t be proven, at least not until scientists begin to identify genes for human preferences, but it goes like this: Our brains developed under the pressure of natural selection to make us good foragers, which is how humans have spent 99 percent of their time on Earth. The presence of flowers, as even I understood as a boy, is a reliable predictor of future food. People who were drawn to flowers, and who further could distinguish among them and then remember where in the landscape they’d seen them, would be much more successful foragers than people who were blind to their significance. According to the neuroscientist Steven Pinker, who outlines this theory in
How the Mind Works,
natural selection was bound to favor those among our ancestors who noticed flowers and had a gift for botanizing—for recognizing plants, classifying them, and then remembering where they grow. 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.

But wouldn’t it make more sense if people were simply hardwired to recognize fruit itself, forget the flowers? Perhaps, but recognizing and recalling flowers helps a forager get to fruit
first,
before the competition. Because I know exactly where on my road the blackberry canes flowered last month, I stand a much better chance of getting to the berries this month before anyone else or any birds do.

I probably should mention at this point that these last speculations are mine, not any scientist’s. But I do wonder if it isn’t significant that our experience of flowers is so deeply drenched in our sense of time. Maybe there’s a good reason we find their fleetingness so piercing, can scarcely look at a flower in bloom without thinking ahead, whether in hope or regret. We might share with certain insects a tropism inclining us toward flowers, but presumably insects can look at a blossom without entertaining thoughts of the past and future—complicated human thoughts that may once have been anything but idle. Flowers have always had important things to teach us about time.

• • •

This is all pure speculation, I know—though speculation itself sometimes seems part and parcel of what a flower is. I’m not sure if they ever asked for it, but flowers have always borne the often absurd weight of our meaning-making, so much so that I’m not prepared to say they
don’t
ask for it. Consider, after all, that signifying is precisely what natural selection has designed flowers to do. They were nature’s tropes long before we came along.