The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world by Michael Pollan

Author:Michael Pollan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Horticulture, Plants, Life Sciences, Ecology, Gardening, Nature, SCIENCE, Human-plant relationships, Marijuana, Life Sciences - Botany, General, Cannabis, Potatoes, Plants - General, Botany, Apples, Tulips, Mathematics, History
ISBN: 9780375760396
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2002-05-27T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Desire: Control

Plant: The Potato

(SOLANUM TUBEROSUM)

To my eye, there are few sights in nature quite as stirring as fresh rows of vegetable seedlings rising like a green city on the spring ground. I love the on-off digital rhythm of new green plant and black turned loam, the geometrical ordering of bounded earth that is the vegetable garden in May—before the plagues, before the rampancy, before the daunting complexities of summer. The sublimities of wilderness have their place, okay, and their legions of American poets, God knows, but I want to speak a word here for the satisfactions of the ordered earth. I’d call it the Agricultural Sublime if that didn’t sound too much like an oxymoron.

Which it probably is. The experience of the sublime is all about nature having her way with us, about the sensation of awe before her power—about feeling small. What I’m talking about is the opposite, and admittedly more dubious, satisfaction of having our way with nature: the pleasure of beholding the reflection of our labor and intelligence in the land. In the same way that Niagara or Everest stirs the first impulse, the farmer’s methodical rows stitching the hills, or the allées of pollarded trees ordering a garden like Versailles, excite the second, filling us with a sense of our power.

These days the sublime is mostly a kind of vacation, in both a literal and a moral sense. After all, who has a bad word to say about wilderness anymore? By comparison, this other impulse, the desire to exert our control over nature’s wildness, bristles with ambiguity. We’re unsure about our power in nature, its legitimacy, and its reality, and rightly so. Perhaps more than most, the farmer or the gardener understands that his control is always something of a fiction, depending as it does on luck and weather and much else that is beyond his control. It is only the suspension of disbelief that allows him to plant again every spring, to wade out in the season’s uncertainties. Before long the pests will come, the storms and droughts and blights, as if to remind him just how imperfect the human power implied by those pristine rows really is.

In 1999 a freak December windstorm, more powerful than any Europeans could remember, laid waste to many of André Lenôtre’s centuries-old plantings at Versailles, crumpling in a matter of seconds that garden’s perfect geometries—perhaps as potent an image of human mastery as we have. When I saw the pictures of the wrecked allées, the straight lines scrabbled, the painterly perspectives ruined, it occurred to me that a less emphatically ordered garden would have been better able to withstand the storm’s fury and repair itself afterward. So what are we to make of such a disaster? It all depends: on whether one regards that particular storm as a straightforward proof of our hubris and nature’s infinitely superior power or, as some scientists now do, as an effect of global warming, which is adding to the atmosphere’s instability. In

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