The Botany Of Desire Part 1

THE BOTANY OF DESIRE.

by Michael Pollan.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

I had a great deal of help in the making of this book at every step of the way. My thanks first to all the people who gave so generously of their time and knowledge while I was reporting and researching the project; their names appear in the Sources.

Ever since I started writing books a dozen or so years ago, I've had the privilege and even greater pleasure of working with Ann G.o.doff; indeed, by now I can't imagine writing a book without the net of her wisdom, trust, and friends.h.i.+p. My literary agent, Amanda Urban, has also been there since the beginning. She knew before anyone else that The Botany of Desire The Botany of Desire was the book I should be writing, and, straight through, her judgment on all matters has been indispensable. was the book I should be writing, and, straight through, her judgment on all matters has been indispensable.

Mark Edmundson has also had a hand in all three of my books, though for no other reason but friends.h.i.+p. He read the ma.n.u.script with great care and intelligence, parts of it more than once, and every page he touched he made better. Just as important, though, have been the sympathetic ear and priceless reading suggestions he offered along the way. I've been incredibly fortunate, too, to have the gifted editorial eye of Paul Tough, who has gracefully morphed from student to teacher; his suggestions were invaluable. I also owe a large debt of grat.i.tude to Mardi Mellon, at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who generously brought her scientific eye to bear on the ma.n.u.script, saving me from all manner of embarra.s.sment; whatever errors remain, however, are mine alone.

My initial forays into the worlds of marijuana-growing and genetically engineered potatoes were sponsored by The New York Times Magazine The New York Times Magazine; heartfelt thanks to Gerry Marzorati, Adam Moss, and Jack Rosenthal for their unstinting support and encouragement, as well as to Stephen Mihm for his stellar research a.s.sistance. Carol Schneider, Robbin Schiff, Benjamin Dreyer, Alexa Ca.s.sanos, and Kate Niedzwiecki have been invaluable allies, as are, always, Jack Hitt, Mark Danner, and Allan Gurga.n.u.s. Thanks also to Isaac Pollan for his encouragement and, on the bad days, his understanding and comfort.

And finally, to Judith, who really comes first, because without her eye, ear, wisdom, support, patience, encouragement, discernment, foresight, confidence, companions.h.i.+p, judgment, clarity, humor, and love, none of this would ever have gotten done.

Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut October 2000

INTRODUCTION.

The Human b.u.mblebee.

The seeds of this book were first planted in my garden-while I was planting seeds, as a matter of fact. Sowing seed is pleasant, desultory, not terribly challenging work; there's plenty of s.p.a.ce left over for thinking about other things while you're doing it. On this particular May afternoon, I happened to be sowing rows in the neighborhood of a flowering apple tree that was fairly vibrating with bees. And what I found myself thinking about was this: What existential difference is there between the human being's role in this (or any) garden and the b.u.mblebee's?

If this sounds like a laughable comparison, consider what it was I was doing in the garden that afternoon: disseminating the genes of one species and not another, in this case a fingerling potato instead of, let's say, a leek. Gardeners like me tend to think such choices are our sovereign prerogative: in the s.p.a.ce of this garden, I tell myself, I alone determine which species will thrive and which will disappear. I'm in charge here, in other words, and behind me stand other humans still more in charge: the long chain of gardeners and botanists, plant breeders, and, these days, genetic engineers who "selected," "developed," or "bred" the particular potato that I decided to plant. Even our grammar makes the terms of this relations.h.i.+p perfectly clear: I choose the plants, I pull the weeds, I harvest the crops I choose the plants, I pull the weeds, I harvest the crops. We divide the world into subjects and objects, and here in the garden, as in nature generally, we humans are the subjects.

But that afternoon in the garden I found myself wondering: What if that grammar is all wrong? What if it's really nothing more than a self-serving conceit? A b.u.mblebee would probably also regard himself as a subject in the garden and the bloom he's plundering for its drop of nectar as an object. But we know that this is just a failure of his imagination. The truth of the matter is that the flower has cleverly manipulated the bee into hauling its pollen from blossom to blossom.

The ancient relations.h.i.+p between bees and flowers is a cla.s.sic example of what is known as "coevolution." In a coevolutionary bargain like the one struck by the bee and the apple tree, the two parties act on each other to advance their individual interests but wind up trading favors: food for the bee, transportation for the apple genes. Consciousness needn't enter into it on either side, and the traditional distinction between subject and object is meaningless.

Matters between me and the spud I was planting, I realized, really aren't much different; we, too, are partners in a coevolutionary relations.h.i.+p, as indeed we have been ever since the birth of agriculture more than ten thousand years ago. Like the apple blossom, whose form and scent have been selected by bees over countless generations, the size and taste of the potato have been selected over countless generations by us-by Incas and Irishmen, even by people like me ordering french fries at McDonald's. Bees and humans alike have their criteria for selection: symmetry and sweetness in the case of the bee; heft and nutritional value in the case of the potato-eating human. The fact that one of us has evolved to become intermittently aware of its desires makes no difference whatsoever to the flower or the potato taking part in this arrangement. All those plants care about is what every being cares about on the most basic genetic level: making more copies of itself. Through trial and error these plant species have found that the best way to do that is to induce animals-bees or people, it hardly matters-to spread their genes. How? By playing on the animals' desires, conscious and otherwise. The flowers and spuds that manage to do this most effectively are the ones that get to be fruitful and multiply.

So the question arose in my mind that day: Did I choose to plant these potatoes, or did the potato make me do it? In fact, both statements are true. I can remember the exact moment that spud seduced me, showing off its k.n.o.bby charms in the pages of a seed catalog. I think it was the tasty-sounding "b.u.t.tery yellow flesh" that did it. This was a trivial, semiconscious event; it never occurred to me that our catalog encounter was of any evolutionary consequence whatsoever. Yet evolution consists of an infinitude of trivial, unconscious events, and in the evolution of the potato my reading of a particular seed catalog on a particular January evening counts as one of them.

That May afternoon, the garden suddenly appeared before me in a whole new light, the manifold delights it offered to the eye and nose and tongue no longer quite so innocent or pa.s.sive. All these plants, which I'd always regarded as the objects of my desire, were also, I realized, subjects, acting on me, getting me to do things for them they couldn't do for themselves.

And that's when I had the idea: What would happen if we looked at the world beyond the garden this way, regarded our place in nature from the same upside-down perspective?

This book attempts to do just that, by telling the story of four familiar plants-the apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato-and the human desires that link their destinies to our own. Its broader subject is the complex reciprocal relations.h.i.+p between the human and natural world, which I approach from a somewhat unconventional angle: I take seriously the plant's point of view.

The four plants whose stories this book tells are what we call "domesticated species," a rather one-sided term-that grammar again-that leaves the erroneous impression that we're in charge. We automatically think of domestication as something we do to other species, but it makes just as much sense to think of it as something certain plants and animals have done to us, a clever evolutionary strategy for advancing their own interests. The species that have spent the last ten thousand or so years figuring out how best to feed, heal, clothe, intoxicate, and otherwise delight us have made themselves some of nature's greatest success stories.

The surprising thing is, we don't ordinarily regard species like the cow and the potato, the tulip and the dog, as nature's more extraordinary creatures. Domesticated species don't command our respect the way their wild cousins often do. Evolution may reward interdependence, but our thinking selves continue to prize self-reliance. The wolf is somehow more impressive to us than the dog.

Yet there are fifty million dogs in America today, only ten thousand wolves. So what does the dog know about getting along in this world that its wild ancestor doesn't? The big thing the dog knows about-the subject it has mastered in the ten thousand years it has been evolving at our side-is us: our needs and desires, our emotions and values, all of which it has folded into its genes as part of a sophisticated strategy for survival. If you could read the genome of the dog like a book, you would learn a great deal about who we are and what makes us tick. We don't ordinarily give plants as much credit as animals, but the same would be true of the genetic books of the apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato. We could read volumes about ourselves in their pages, in the ingenious sets of instructions they've developed for turning people into bees.

After ten thousand years of coevolution, their genes are rich archives of cultural as well as natural information. The DNA of that tulip there, the ivory one with the petals attenuated like sabers, contains detailed instructions on how best to catch the eye not of a bee but of an Ottoman Turk; it has something to tell us about that age's idea of beauty. Likewise, every Russet Burbank potato holds within it a treatise about our industrial food chain-and our taste for long, perfectly golden french fries. That's because we have spent the last few thousand years remaking these species through artificial selection, transforming a tiny, toxic root node into a fat, nouris.h.i.+ng potato and a short, unprepossessing wildflower into a tall, ravis.h.i.+ng tulip. What is much less obvious, at least to us, is that these plants have, at the same time, been going about the business of remaking us.

I call this book The Botany of Desire The Botany of Desire because it is as much about the human desires that connect us to these plants as it is about the plants themselves. My premise is that these human desires form a part of natural history in the same way the hummingbird's love of red does, or the ant's taste for the aphid's honeydew. I think of them as the human equivalent of nectar. So while the book explores the social history of these plants, weaving them into our story, it is at the same time a natural history of the four human desires these plants evolved to stir and gratify. because it is as much about the human desires that connect us to these plants as it is about the plants themselves. My premise is that these human desires form a part of natural history in the same way the hummingbird's love of red does, or the ant's taste for the aphid's honeydew. I think of them as the human equivalent of nectar. So while the book explores the social history of these plants, weaving them into our story, it is at the same time a natural history of the four human desires these plants evolved to stir and gratify.

I'm interested not only in how the potato altered the course of European history or how cannabis helped fire the romantic revolution in the West, but also in the way notions in the minds of men and women transformed the appearance, taste, and mental effects of these plants. Through the process of coevolution human ideas find their way into natural facts: the contours of a tulip's petals, say, or the precise tang of a Jonagold apple.

The four desires I explore here are sweetness sweetness, broadly defined, in the story of the apple; beauty beauty in the tulip's; in the tulip's; intoxication intoxication in the story of cannabis; and in the story of cannabis; and control control in the story of the potato-specifically, in the story of a genetically altered potato I grew in my garden to see where the ancient arts of domestication may now be headed. These four plants have something important to teach us about these four desires-that is, about what makes us tick. For instance, I don't think we can begin to understand beauty's gravitational pull without first understanding the flower, since it was the flower that first ushered the idea of beauty into the world the moment, long ago, when floral attraction emerged as an evolutionary strategy. By the same token, intoxication is a human desire we might never have cultivated had it not been for a handful of plants that manage to manufacture chemicals with the precise molecular key needed to unlock the mechanisms in our brain governing pleasure, memory, and maybe even transcendence. in the story of the potato-specifically, in the story of a genetically altered potato I grew in my garden to see where the ancient arts of domestication may now be headed. These four plants have something important to teach us about these four desires-that is, about what makes us tick. For instance, I don't think we can begin to understand beauty's gravitational pull without first understanding the flower, since it was the flower that first ushered the idea of beauty into the world the moment, long ago, when floral attraction emerged as an evolutionary strategy. By the same token, intoxication is a human desire we might never have cultivated had it not been for a handful of plants that manage to manufacture chemicals with the precise molecular key needed to unlock the mechanisms in our brain governing pleasure, memory, and maybe even transcendence.

Domestication is about a whole lot more than fat tubers and docile sheep; the offspring of the ancient marriage of plants and people are far stranger and more marvelous than we realize. There is a natural history of the human imagination, of beauty, religion, and possibly philosophy too. One of my aims in this book is to shed some light on the part in that history these ordinary plants have played.

Plants are so unlike people that it's very difficult for us to appreciate fully their complexity and sophistication. Yet plants have been evolving much, much longer than we have, have been inventing new strategies for survival and perfecting their designs for so long that to say that one of us is the more "advanced" really depends on how you define that term, on what "advances" you value. Naturally we value abilities such as consciousness, toolmaking, and language, if only because these have been the destinations of our own evolutionary journey thus far. Plants have traveled all that distance and then some-they've just traveled in a different direction.

Plants are nature's alchemists, expert at transforming water, soil, and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive, much less manufacture. While we were nailing down consciousness and learning to walk on two feet, they were, by the same process of natural selection, inventing photosynthesis (the astonis.h.i.+ng trick of converting sunlight into food) and perfecting organic chemistry. As it turns out, many of the plants' discoveries in chemistry and physics have served us well. From plants come chemical compounds that nourish and heal and poison and delight the senses, others that rouse and put to sleep and intoxicate, and a few with the astounding power to alter consciousness-even to plant dreams in the brains of awake humans.

Why would they go to all this trouble? Why should plants bother to devise the recipes for so many complex molecules and then expend the energy needed to manufacture them? One important reason is defense. A great many of the chemicals plants produce are designed, by natural selection, to compel other creatures to leave them alone: deadly poisons, foul flavors, toxins to confound the minds of predators. But many other of the substances plants make have exactly the opposite effect, drawing other creatures to them by stirring and gratifying their desires.

The same great existential fact of plant life explains why plants make chemicals to both repel and attract other species: immobility. The one big thing plants can't do is move, or, to be more precise, locomote. Plants can't escape the creatures that prey on them; they also can't change location or extend their range without help.

And so about a hundred million years ago plants stumbled on a way-actually a few thousand different ways-of getting animals to carry them, and their genes, here and there. This was the evolutionary watershed a.s.sociated with the advent of the angiosperms, an extraordinary new cla.s.s of plants that made showy flowers and formed large seeds that other species were induced to disseminate. Plants began evolving burrs that attach to animal fur like Velcro, flowers that seduce honeybees in order to powder their thighs with pollen, and acorns that squirrels obligingly taxi from one forest to another, bury, and then, just often enough, forget to eat.

Even evolution evolves. About ten thousand years ago the world witnessed a second flowering of plant diversity that we would come to call, somewhat self-centeredly, "the invention of agriculture." A group of angiosperms refined their basic put-the-animals-to-work strategy to take advantage of one particular animal that had evolved not only to move freely around the earth, but to think and trade complicated thoughts. These plants. .h.i.t on a remarkably clever strategy: getting us to move and think for them. Now came edible gra.s.ses (such as wheat and corn) that incited humans to cut down vast forests to make more room for them; flowers whose beauty would transfix whole cultures; plants so compelling and useful and tasty they would inspire human beings to seed, transport, extol, and even write books about them. This is one of those books.

So am I suggesting that the plants made me do it? Only in the sense that the flower "makes" the bee pay it a visit. Evolution doesn't depend on will or intention to work; it is, almost by definition, an unconscious, unwilled process. All it requires are beings compelled, as all plants and animals are, to make more of themselves by whatever means trial and error present. Sometimes an adaptive trait is so clever it appears purposeful: the ant that "cultivates" its own gardens of edible fungus, for instance, or the pitcher plant that "convinces" a fly it's a piece of rotting meat. But such traits are clever only in retrospect. Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.

By the same token, we're p.r.o.ne 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 pa.s.sive objects, but in a coevolutionary relations.h.i.+p 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 gra.s.ses did to people as a way to conquer the trees.

When Charles Darwin was writing The Origin of Species 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 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 b.u.t.ter pear, a c.o.c.ker spaniel or a show pigeon. 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 b.u.t.ter pear, a c.o.c.ker 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 pa.s.sed 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 const.i.tutes "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 Galapagos.

In the years since Darwin published The Origin of Species 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 s.p.a.ce once ruled exclusively by natural selection.

That s.p.a.ce, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 left nature, as if nature were something that only happens outside. 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 cla.s.ses 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 s.p.a.ce 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' pa.s.sion 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 relations.h.i.+ps 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 "relations.h.i.+p to nature"-to borrow that curious, revealing phrase. (What other species can even be said to have a "relations.h.i.+p" 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 relations.h.i.+p 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).

If 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 makes.h.i.+ft 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 Th.o.r.eau 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 pa.s.sengers. 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 b.u.mblebee, and why he would rig up his boat the way he did. Instead of towing his s.h.i.+pment 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 a.s.sume 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 pa.s.senger 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 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. 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 subst.i.tuted 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 squas.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sure his readers that Chapman "was not a complete complete crank." The emphasis is mine. 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, pa.s.ses a used-car dealers.h.i.+p, 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, Ma.s.sachusetts, in 1797, at the age of twenty-three, Chapman had s.h.i.+ed 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," Th.o.r.eau once wrote, "to set a squirrel's teeth on edge and make a jay scream." Th.o.r.eau 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 l.u.s.trous brown they might have been oiled and polished by a woodworker. Two facts about these seeds are worth noting. First, they contain a small quant.i.ty 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 Malus domestica-the domesticated apple-is a wild apple that grows in the mountains of Kazakhstan. In some places there, Malus sieversii, 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 softb.a.l.l.s, 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. 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 softb.a.l.l.s, 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.

The silk route traverses some of these forests, and it seems likely that travelers pa.s.sing through would have picked the biggest and tastiest of these fruits to take with them on their journey west. Along the way seeds were dropped, wildlings sprouted, and Malus Malus hybridized freely with related species, such as the European crab apples, eventually producing millions of novel apple types all through Asia and Europe. Most of these would have yielded unpalatable fruit, though even these trees would have been worth growing for cider or forage. hybridized freely with related species, such as the European crab apples, eventually producing millions of novel apple types all through Asia and Europe. Most of these would have yielded unpalatable fruit, though even these trees would have been worth growing for cider or forage.

True domestication had to await the invention of grafting by the Chinese. Sometime in the second millennium B.C., B.C., the Chinese discovered that a slip of wood cut from a desirable tree could be notched into the trunk of another tree; once this graft "took," the fruit produced on new wood growing out from that juncture would share the characteristics of its more desirable parent. This technique is what eventually allowed the Greeks and Romans to select and propagate the choicest specimens. At this point the apple seems to have settled down for a while. According to Pliny, the Romans cultivated twenty-three different varieties of apples, some of which they took with them to England. The tiny, oblate Lady apple, which still shows up in markets at Christmastime, is thought to be one of these. the Chinese discovered that a slip of wood cut from a desirable tree could be notched into the trunk of another tree; once this graft "took," the fruit produced on new wood growing out from that juncture would share the characteristics of its more desirable parent. This technique is what eventually allowed the Greeks and Romans to select and propagate the choicest specimens. At this point the apple seems to have settled down for a while. According to Pliny, the Romans cultivated twenty-three different varieties of apples, some of which they took with them to England. The tiny, oblate Lady apple, which still shows up in markets at Christmastime, is thought to be one of these.

As Th.o.r.eau suggested in an 1862 essay in praise of wild apples, this most "civilized" of trees followed the westward course of empire, from the ancient world to Europe and then on to America with the early settlers. Much like the Puritans, who regarded their crossing to America as a kind of baptism or rebirth, the apple couldn't cross the Atlantic without changing its ident.i.ty-a fact that encouraged generations of Americans to hear echoes of their own story in the story of this fruit. The apple in America became a parable.

The earliest immigrants to America had brought grafted Old World apple trees with them, but in general these trees fared poorly in their new home. Harsh winters killed off many of them outright; the fruit of others was nipped in the bud by late-spring frosts unknown in England. But the colonists also planted seeds, often saved from apples eaten during their Atlantic pa.s.sage, and these seedling trees, called "pippins," eventually prospered (especially after the colonists imported honeybees to improve pollination, which had been spotty at first). Ben Franklin reported that by 1781 the fame of the Newtown Pippin, a homegrown apple discovered in a Flus.h.i.+ng, New York, cider orchard, had already spread to Europe.

In effect, the apple, like the settlers themselves, had to forsake its former domestic life and return to the wild before it could be reborn as an American-as Newtown Pippins and Baldwins, Golden Russets and Jonathans. This is what the seeds on John Chapman's boat were doing. (It may also be what Chapman was doing.) By reverting to wild ways-to s.e.xual reproduction, that is, and going to seed-the apple was able to reach down into its vast store of genes, acc.u.mulated over the course of its travels through Asia and Europe, and discover the precise combination of traits required to survive in the New World. The apple probably also found some of what it needed by hybridizing with the wild American crabs, which are the only native American apple trees. Thanks to the species' inherent prodigality, coupled with the work of individuals like John Chapman, in a remarkably short period of time the New World had its own apples, adapted to the soil and climate and day length of North America, apples that were as distinct from the old European stock as the Americans themselves.

From Brilliant, I followed the course of the Ohio down toward Marietta. Moving south, the landscape begins to relax, the steep, rocky hillsides that leap up from the river near Wheeling reclining into rich-looking farmland. It was the first week of October, a Sunday, and many of the cornfields had been only partially shaved, presenting a cartoon of work interrupted. In some fields the tall dun corn had been cut away to reveal an old-time oil derrick. The first oil fields in America were found just outside Marietta; a farmer digging his well would notice bubbles of natural gas percolating through the water-the unmistakable scent of hitting it big. (Before then, discovering a great apple tree in one's cider orchard had been the ticket.) Most of the oil rigs are stilled and rusted, but now and then I spotted one still pumping l.u.s.tily away as if the year were 1925.

In Marietta, I stopped in at the Campus Martius Museum, a small brick history museum devoted to Ohio's pioneer days, when Marietta served as the gateway to the Northwest Territory. The first thing a visitor encounters is a sprawling tabletop diorama showing what the area looked like in 1788. That was the year a Revolutionary War hero named Rufus Putnam, who had won a charter for his Ohio Company from the Continental Congress, arrived here with a small party of men. Their families would follow a few months later, after the men had constructed the small walled settlement that formerly stood on this spot.

Eighteenth-century maps on the walls trace an intricately ramifying tree of rivers and streams reaching north from the Muskingum's trunk, connecting the dots of a scatter of place-names that quickly thins to blankness. The maps force you to think of Ohio in an unaccustomed way, no longer as a middle but as a beginning, an edge. That, of course, was what this place was in 1801, when Chapman first stood here: America's threshold place, the cliff of everything unknown and yet to be-unless, of course, you happened to be a Delaware or Wyandot, for whom the very notion of wilderness was an error or a lie. But for a white American in 1801, Marietta was the last stop before stepping over the edge.

In 1801 one of the things you could buy in Marietta before heading into the interior was apple trees. Soon after his arrival, Rufus Putnam had himself planted a nursery on the opposite bank of the Ohio, so that he might sell trees to the pioneers pa.s.sing through. What was surprising about this was that the apples Putnam sold were not grown from seeds: they were grafted trees. In fact, his nursery offered a selection of the well-known eastern varieties-the Roxbury Russets, Newtown Pippins, and Early Chandlers that had already made their names in colonial New England.

What this meant, of course, was that John Chapman's apples were neither the first in Ohio nor by any stretch the best, for his were seedling trees exclusively. Chapman, somewhat perversely, would have nothing to do with grafted trees. "They can improve the apple in that way," he's supposed to have said, "but that is only a device of man, and it is wicked to cut up trees that way. The correct method is to select good seeds and plant them in good ground and G.o.d only can improve the apple."