In my humble opinion, Michael Pollan is not just a botanist, but also a philosopher, a sociologist, and a poet. As the blurb on the back of his book, The Botany of Desire, says, “In telling the stories of four familiar species [of plants], Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?” Pollan offers a beautiful discussion about the co-evolution of human beings alongside the plants that we have ‘domesticated’. The way that a certain species of plant most likely ensures its survival is by being the most likely of them all to satiate our desires. The different chapters are titled according to the plants that he believes represents some integral part in our spectrum of human desires. The apple represents our desire for sweetness, the tulip for beauty, marijuana for intoxication, and the potato for control.

Pollan has an astute understanding of the history of these plants’ domestication. For example, in his chapter on the apple, Pollan talks about how the fruit that we associate with the term ‘apple’ actually comes from a specific species of plant, not all of which produce fruit that we would consider consumable. Most apple species are something else other than the red or green apples that we think of as delicacies. The specific apples that have been named, for example the Golden Delicious or the Granny Smith, can all be traced back to one single tree that has been grafted. Over generations of grafting (not to be confused with cross-breeding) has yielded the exact same style of apple over and over again. In essence, the Golden Delicious and the Granny Smith are two examples of the apple that have reached evolutionary maturity by coevolving with us.

Pollan gets more philosophical in his chapter on marijuana. The socialization and stigma in Western societies against marijuana, he argues, is borne out of a Judaeo-Christian sentiment of seeing alcohol as being the more ‘civilized’ of the two drugs. Alcohol is created out of a complex human process of the fermentation and distillation of grain, whereas marijuana is ready to be consumed on its own accord, straight off the plant. Pollan’s insights into recent science about the nature of marijuana intoxication are also intriguing: in the process of losing our short-term memory (due to the effects of THC, the active component of marijuana, on our hippocampus, which is the area in our brain that affects memory), we are constantly reacting to things afresh, as if seeing them for the first time. After reading this book, you will feel the same way the next time you eat a potato, and you’ll never think of tulips the same way again.

With little prior experience of thinking of the domesticated plant in sociological terms, let alone philosophical terms, I approached the book with some degree of apprehension at first. I really enjoyed reading The Botany of Desire, because Pollan’s prose reads like poetry. His passion and enthusiasm for the topic of plants really shines through and captivates even the most botanically disinclined of readers.