The Botany Of Desire Part 2

Befitting the American success story, the botany of the apple-the fact that the one thing it won't do is come true from seed-meant that its history would be a history of heroic individuals, rather than groups or types or lines. There is, or at least there was, a single Golden Delicious tree, of which every subsequent tree bearing that name has been a grafted clone. The original Golden Delicious stood until the 1950s on a hillside in Clay County, West Virginia, where it lived out its golden years inside a padlocked steel cage wired with a burglar alarm. (The cage setup was a publicity stunt organized by Paul Stark, C.M.'s brother, who bought the tree in 1914 for the then-princely sum of $5,000.) Today a granite monument marks the spot where the original Red Delicious grew, between the rows on Jesse Hiatt's Iowa farm. These were two of the many giants that walked what Andrew Jackson Downing called "the young American orchard."

So what native-plant zealot would dare to challenge the right of such trees to call themselves American now? Their ancestors may have evolved half a world away, but these apples have by now undergone much the same process of acculturation as the people who planted them. In fact, they've gone further than the people ever did, for the apples reshuffled their very genes in order to reinvent themselves for life in the New World.

Several of these Americans have since found homes in distant lands (the Golden Delicious now grows on five continents), but many others thrive in America and nowhere else and in some cases are adapted to life in but a single region. The Jonathan, for example, achieves perfection strictly in the American Midwest (which is somewhat surprising, considering it was discovered in the Hudson Valley). My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural history won't be reversed: by now the Jonathan's as much an American as I am.

The golden age of American apples that John Chapman helped to underwrite lives on in the Geneva orchard-yet just about no place else. In fact, the sole reason for its existence is that these erstwhile giants of the young American orchard, the actual and metaphorical descendants of Appleseed's apple seeds, have been all but killed off by the dominance of a few commercially important apples-that, and a pinched modern idea of what const.i.tutes sweetness. A far more brutal winnowing of the apple's prodigious variability took place around the turn of the century. That's when the temperance movement drove cider underground and cut down the American cider orchard, that wildness preserve and riotous breeding ground of apple originality. Americans began to eat rather than drink their apples, thanks in part to a PR slogan: "An apple a day keeps the doctor away." Around the same time, refrigeration made possible a national market for apples, and the industry got together and decided it would be wise to simplify that market by planting and promoting only a small handful of brand-name varieties. That market had no use for the immense variety of qualities the nineteenth-century apple embodied. Now just two of these qualities counted: beauty and sweetness. Beauty in an apple meant a uniform redness, by and large; russeting now doomed even the tastiest apple.

As for sweetness, the complicated metaphorical resonance of that word had by now been flattened out, mainly by the easy availability of cheap sugar. What had been a complex desire had become a mere craving-a sweet tooth. Sweetness in an apple now meant sugariness, plain and simple. And in a culture of easy sweetness, apples now had to compete with every other kind of sugary snack food in the supermarket; even the touch of acid that gives the apple's sweetness some dimension fell out of favor.* And so the Red and Golden Delicious, which are related only by the marketing genius of the Stark brothers (who named and trademarked them both) and their exceptional sweetness, came to dominate the vast, grafted monoculture that the American orchard has become. Apple breeders, locked in a kind of sweetness arms race with junk food, lean heavily on the genes of these two apples, which can be found in most of the popular apples developed in the last few years, including the Fuji and the Gala. Thousands of apple traits, and the genes that code those traits, have become extinct as the vast flowering of apple diversity that Johnny Apple-seed sponsored has been winnowed down to the small handful of varieties that can pa.s.s through the needle's eye of our narrow conceptions of sweetness and beauty. And so the Red and Golden Delicious, which are related only by the marketing genius of the Stark brothers (who named and trademarked them both) and their exceptional sweetness, came to dominate the vast, grafted monoculture that the American orchard has become. Apple breeders, locked in a kind of sweetness arms race with junk food, lean heavily on the genes of these two apples, which can be found in most of the popular apples developed in the last few years, including the Fuji and the Gala. Thousands of apple traits, and the genes that code those traits, have become extinct as the vast flowering of apple diversity that Johnny Apple-seed sponsored has been winnowed down to the small handful of varieties that can pa.s.s through the needle's eye of our narrow conceptions of sweetness and beauty.

This is why the Geneva orchard is a museum. "Today's commercial apples represent only a small fraction of the Malus 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 c.o.x's Orange Pippin. Breeders keep going back to the same well, and it's getting shallower." 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 c.o.x'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 s.e.xually, as they do when they're grown from seed, and s.e.x 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 s.e.xually 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.x 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 Malus sieversii from a wave of real estate development spreading out from Alma-Ata to the surrounding hills. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 Malus genome. Well, here was the rest of it. 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 G.o.d'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 b.a.l.l.s and dusky purple berries. I saw a whole a.s.sortment of baseb.a.l.l.s, oblate and conic and perfectly round, some of them bright as infield gra.s.s, others dull as wood. And I picked big, s.h.i.+ny 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 here's an apple!-only to suddenly veer into a bitterness so profound it makes my stomach rise even in recollection. 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," Th.o.r.eau 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 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. 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 m.u.f.fled. 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).

The 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) ma.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+fting ideals of beauty, and for the tulip the story of the twentieth century has mainly been the rise and triumph of all this ma.s.s-produced eye candy.

Every fall my parents would buy mesh bags of these bulbs, a.s.sortments 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 those were colors, and tulips could incarnate them all. This being the early days of the s.p.a.ce program, the st.u.r.dy tulip stalks reminded me of rockets poised for launch beneath their fat, parti-colored payloads. were colors, and tulips could incarnate them all. This being the early days of the s.p.a.ce program, the st.u.r.dy 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 pa.s.sion.

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 ca.n.a.l 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 pa.s.sion 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 and for the flowers? How did these organs of plant s.e.x 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 for the flowers? How did these organs of plant s.e.x 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 real beeline, though, one that makes a great many stops along its way. 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 s.p.a.ce, but what was the point? The flowers I welcomed into my garden were precisely the ones that had had a point, that foretold the fruit to come: the pretty white-and-yellow b.u.t.ton 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. a point, that foretold the fruit to come: the pretty white-and-yellow b.u.t.ton 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 cuc.u.mber. 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 wors.h.i.+p 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, 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. 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 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? 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, 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, cla.s.sifying 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. natural selection was bound to favor those among our ancestors who noticed flowers and had a gift for botanizing-for recognizing plants, cla.s.sifying 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, first, before the compet.i.tion. 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. before the compet.i.tion. 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 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. 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.

Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonis.h.i.+ng array of devices-visual, olfactory, and tactile-to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals. In order to achieve their objectives, many flowers rely not just on simple chemical signals but on signs, sometimes even on a kind of symbolism. Some plant species go so far as to impersonate other creatures or things in order to secure pollination or, in the case of carnivorous plants, a meal. To entice flies into its inner sanctum (there to be digested by waiting enzymes), the pitcher plant has developed a weirdly striated maroon-and-white flower that is not at all attractive unless you happen to be attracted to decaying meat. (The flower's rancid scent reinforces this effect.) Ophryus orchids look uncannily like insects, of all things-like bees or flies, depending on the orchid species in question. The Victorians believed this mimicry was intended to scare away insects so the flower could, chastely, pollinate itself. What the Victorians failed to consider was that the Ophryus might resemble an insect precisely in order to attract insects to it. The flower has evolved exactly the right pattern of curves and spots and hairiness to convince certain male insects that it is a female as viewed, tantalizingly, from behind. Botanists call the resultant behavior on the part of the male insect "pseudocopulation"; they call the flower that inspires this behavior the "prost.i.tute orchid." In his frenzy of attempted intercourse, the insect ensures the orchid's pollination. That's because the insect's rising frustration compels him to rush around mounting one blossom after another, effectively disseminating the flower's genes, if not his own.

This stands for that: flowers by their very nature traffic in a kind of metaphor, so that even a meadow of wildflowers brims with meanings not of our making. Move into the garden, however, and the meanings only multiply as the flowers take aim not only at the bee's or the bat's or the b.u.t.terfly's obscure notions of the good or the beautiful, but at ours as well. Sometime long ago the flower's gift for metaphor crossed with our own, and the offspring of that match, that miraculous symbiosis of desire, are the flowers of the garden. flowers by their very nature traffic in a kind of metaphor, so that even a meadow of wildflowers brims with meanings not of our making. Move into the garden, however, and the meanings only multiply as the flowers take aim not only at the bee's or the bat's or the b.u.t.terfly's obscure notions of the good or the beautiful, but at ours as well. Sometime long ago the flower's gift for metaphor crossed with our own, and the offspring of that match, that miraculous symbiosis of desire, are the flowers of the garden.

In my garden right now it is high summer, the middle of July, and the place is so crowded with flowers, is so busy and multifarious, that it feels more like a city street than a quiet corner of the countryside. At first the scene presents only a daunting confusion of sensory information, a bustle of floral color and scent set to a soundtrack of buzzing insects and rustling leaves, but after a while the individual flowers begin to come into focus. They're the garden's dramatis personae, each of them taking a brief turn on the summer stage, during which it tries its level best to catch our eye. Did I say our our eye? Well, not eye? Well, not only only ours-for there's also that other audience, the bees and b.u.t.terflies, moths and wasps and hummingbirds and all the other potential pollinators. ours-for there's also that other audience, the bees and b.u.t.terflies, moths and wasps and hummingbirds and all the other potential pollinators.

By now the old roses have mostly finished, leaving behind tired shrubs wadded with sad bits of old tissue, but the rugosas and teas are still pumping out color, attracting attention. Tangled up in their petals and seemingly inebriated, the j.a.panese beetles are dining and humping intently, sometimes three and four of them going at it at once; it's a very Roman scene, and it leaves the blossoms trashed. Farther down the garden path the daylilies lean forward expectantly, like dogs; tiny wasps accept the invitation to climb way up into their throats in search of nectar; afterward the bugs come stumbling out like drunks from a bar. Before they hit the open air, though, they jostle the lily's dainty scoop of stamens, chalking themselves with pollen they'll later dust off on the pistils of some other blossom.*

At the front of the perennial bed the lamb's ears form a low, soft, gray forest of flower spikes that look as though they've been dipped into a vat of bees: the spikes are completely coated, more wing now than petal, and the whole flower is vibrating with the attention. Behind them and high above, the plume poppies throw clouds of tiny white flowers, intricately hairy up close and irresistible to honeybees, who look to be swimming in the air in and among them. The sweet peas extend themselves seductively on slender stems, but a bee can't gain admittance to their flowers without first prying open their pursed lips; this coy bit of architecture leaves the (erroneous) impression that it is the bee's desire being gratified here, not the pea's.

The bees! The bees will let themselves be lured into the most ridiculous positions, avidly nosing their way like pigs through the thick purple brush of a thistle, rolling around helplessly in a single peony's blond Medusa thatch of stamens-they remind me of Odysseus's crew in thrall to Circe. To my eye the bees appear lost in transports of s.e.xual ecstasy, but of course that's only a projection. It's only a coincidence-isn't it?-that this pa.s.sionate flower-bee embrace that made people think about s.e.x for a thousand years before pollination was understood really is is about s.e.x. "Flying p.e.n.i.ses" is what one botanist called bees. But with the rare exception of a flower like the prost.i.tute orchid, for the insects at least it's really not about the s.e.x; to the extent they're p.e.n.i.ses, they're unwitting p.e.n.i.ses. Still, the bees certainly do seem besides themselves, and they may well be, but probably on account of the sugary nectars, or maybe one of the designer drugs flowers sometimes deploy in order to drive bees to distraction. Or, who knows, maybe they're just lost in their work. about s.e.x. "Flying p.e.n.i.ses" is what one botanist called bees. But with the rare exception of a flower like the prost.i.tute orchid, for the insects at least it's really not about the s.e.x; to the extent they're p.e.n.i.ses, they're unwitting p.e.n.i.ses. Still, the bees certainly do seem besides themselves, and they may well be, but probably on account of the sugary nectars, or maybe one of the designer drugs flowers sometimes deploy in order to drive bees to distraction. Or, who knows, maybe they're just lost in their work.

I've fixed on the bee's-eye view of this scene, but of course the flower's perspective would disclose that in the garden human desire looms just as large. In fact, the place is crowded with species that have evolved expressly to catch my my eye, often to the detriment of getting themselves pollinated. I'm thinking of all the species that have sacrificed their scent in the interest of grander or doubled or improbably colored blooms, ideals of beauty that probably go unappreciated in the kingdom of the pollinators, a place where the eye is not always sovereign. eye, often to the detriment of getting themselves pollinated. I'm thinking of all the species that have sacrificed their scent in the interest of grander or doubled or improbably colored blooms, ideals of beauty that probably go unappreciated in the kingdom of the pollinators, a place where the eye is not always sovereign.

For many flowers the great love of their lives now is humankind. Those daylilies leaning expectantly forward? Their faces are in fact turned toward us, whose favor now ensures their success better than any bug's can. That peony with the salacious pubic stamens? Blame the Chinese for that one: for thousands of years their poets, discerning manifestations of yin and yang in the garden, likened peony blossoms to a woman's s.e.xual organs (and the bee or b.u.t.terfly to a man's); over time Chinese peonies evolved, by means of artificial selection, to gratify that conceit. Even the perfume of certain Chinese tree peonies is womanly, a scent of flowers tinged with briny sweat; the flowers smell less like perfume out of the bottle than a scent that's spent time on human skin. It may still attract the bees, but by now it's our brain stems the scent is meant to fire.

Making my way through this lit-up landscape, I try to pin down exactly what distinguishes the garden in bloom from an ordinary patch of nature. For starters, the flowering garden is a place you immediately sense is thick with information, thick as a metropolis, in fact. It's an oddly sociable, public sort of place, in which species seem eager to give one another the time of day; they dress up, flirt, flit, visit. By comparison, the surrounding forests and fields are much sleepier boroughs, steadily humming monotonies of green, in which many of the flowers are inconspicuous or short-lived and many of the plants seem to be keeping to their own kind, declining to enlist other species, minding their own business. That business is chiefly photosynthesis, of course, nature's routine factory work; s.e.xual reproduction is going on here too, but with little to show for it: Who ever notices when the conifers release their pollen on the wind, the ferns their minute spores? April through October, every day looks pretty much the same around here. What beauty there is is in large part inadvertent, purposeless, and unadvertised.

Come into the garden, or even the flowering meadow, and the landscape immediately quickens. Hey, what's going on here today? Something, Something, senses even the dimmest bee or boy, something special. Call that something the stirrings of beauty. Beauty in nature often shows up in the vicinity of s.e.x-think of the plumage of birds or mating rituals throughout the animal kingdom. "s.e.xual selection"-that is, evolution's favoring of features that increase a plant's or animal's attractiveness and therefore its reproductive success-is the best explanation we have for the otherwise senseless extravagance of feathers and flowers, maybe also sports cars and bikinis. In nature, at least, the expense of beauty is usually paid for by s.e.x. senses even the dimmest bee or boy, something special. Call that something the stirrings of beauty. Beauty in nature often shows up in the vicinity of s.e.x-think of the plumage of birds or mating rituals throughout the animal kingdom. "s.e.xual selection"-that is, evolution's favoring of features that increase a plant's or animal's attractiveness and therefore its reproductive success-is the best explanation we have for the otherwise senseless extravagance of feathers and flowers, maybe also sports cars and bikinis. In nature, at least, the expense of beauty is usually paid for by s.e.x.

There may or may not be a correlation between the beautiful and the good, but there probably is one between beauty and health. (Which, I suppose, in Darwinian terms, is is the good.) Evolutionary biologists believe that in many creatures beauty is a reliable indicator of health, and therefore a perfectly sensible way to choose one mate over another. Gorgeous plumage, l.u.s.trous hair, symmetrical features are "certificates of health," as one scientist puts it, advertis.e.m.e.nts that a creature carries genes for resistance to parasites the good.) Evolutionary biologists believe that in many creatures beauty is a reliable indicator of health, and therefore a perfectly sensible way to choose one mate over another. Gorgeous plumage, l.u.s.trous hair, symmetrical features are "certificates of health," as one scientist puts it, advertis.e.m.e.nts that a creature carries genes for resistance to parasites* and is not otherwise under stress. A fabulous tail is a metabolic extravagance only the healthy can afford. (In the same way, a fabulous car is a financial extravagance only the successful can afford.) In our own species, too, ideals of beauty often correlate with health: when lack of food was what usually killed people, people judged body fat to be a thing of beauty. (Though the current preference for sickly-pale, rail-thin models suggests that culture can override evolutionary imperatives.) and is not otherwise under stress. A fabulous tail is a metabolic extravagance only the healthy can afford. (In the same way, a fabulous car is a financial extravagance only the successful can afford.) In our own species, too, ideals of beauty often correlate with health: when lack of food was what usually killed people, people judged body fat to be a thing of beauty. (Though the current preference for sickly-pale, rail-thin models suggests that culture can override evolutionary imperatives.) But what about plants, who don't get to choose their mates? Why should the bees, who do the choosing for them, care a fig about plant health? They don't, yet unwittingly they reward it. It's the healthiest flowers that can afford the most extravagant display and sweetest nectar, thereby ensuring the most visits from bees-and therefore the most s.e.x and most offspring. So in a sense, the flowers do choose their mates on the basis of health, using the bees as their proxies.

Before the advent of this arms race of s.e.xual selection-before flowers, before feathers-all nature was the factory. There was beauty there, but it was not beauty by design; what beauty there was was, like that of forests or mountains, strictly in the eye of the beholder.

If you wanted to invent a new myth of the origin of beauty (or at least designed beauty), you could do worse than begin here in the garden, among the flowers. Begin with the petal, where beauty's first principle-contrast with its surroundings-appears, a feat here accomplished with color. The eye, lulled by the all-around green all around, registers the difference and rouses. Bees, once thought to be color-blind, do in fact see color, though they see it differently than we do. Green appears gray, a background hue against which red-which bees perceive as black-stands out most sharply. (Bees can also see at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, where we're blind; a garden in this light must look like a big-city airport at night, lit up and color-coded to direct circling bees to landing zones of nectar and pollen.) Bee or boy, our attention is awakened by a petal's color, alerting us to what comes next, which is form or pattern, beauty's second inflection of the given world. Against the background of inchoate green a contrasting color by itself could well be an accident of some kind (a feather, say, or a dying leaf), but the appearance of symmetry is a reliable expression of formal organization-of purpose, even intent. Symmetry is an unmistakable sign that there's relevant information in a place. That's because symmetry is a property shared by a relatively small number of things in the landscape, all of them of keen interest to us. The shortlist of nature's symmetricals includes other creatures, other people (most notably the faces of other people), human artifacts, and plants-but especially flowers. Symmetry is also a sign of health in a creature, since mutations and environmental stresses can easily disturb it. So paying attention to symmetrical things makes good sense: symmetry is usually significant.

The same holds true for bees. How do we know? Because symmetry in a plant is an extravagance (whereas animals who want to move in a straight line can't do without it), and natural selection probably wouldn't go to the trouble if the bees didn't reward the effort. "The colors and shapes of the flowers are a precise record of what bees find attractive," the poet and critic Frederick Turner has written. He goes on to suggest that it "would be a paradoxically anthropocentric mistake to a.s.sume that, because bees are more primitive organisms ... there is nothing in common between our pleasure in flowers and theirs."

But if the pleasure bees and people take in flowers have a common root, standards of floral beauty soon begin to specialize and diverge-and not just bee from boy, but bee from bee as well. For it seems that different kinds of bees are attracted to different kinds of symmetry. Honeybees favor the radial symmetry of daisies and clover and sunflowers, while b.u.mblebees prefer the bilateral symmetry of orchids, peas, and foxgloves.*

Through their colors and symmetries, through these most elemental principles of beauty (that is, contrast and pattern), flowers alert other species to their presence and significance. Walk among them, and you see faces turned toward you (though not only you), beckoning, greeting, informing, promising-meaning. Beyond that, matters begin to get complicated, the honeybees developing their own canons of beauty, the b.u.mblebees theirs. And then into this great dance of plants and pollinators step us, compounding the meanings of flowers beyond all reason, turning their s.e.xual organs into tropes of our own (and of so much else), drawing and driving the evolution of flowers toward the extraordinary, freakish, and precarious beauty of a Madame Hardy rose or a Semper Augustus tulip. Beyond that, matters begin to get complicated, the honeybees developing their own canons of beauty, the b.u.mblebees theirs. And then into this great dance of plants and pollinators step us, compounding the meanings of flowers beyond all reason, turning their s.e.xual organs into tropes of our own (and of so much else), drawing and driving the evolution of flowers toward the extraordinary, freakish, and precarious beauty of a Madame Hardy rose or a Semper Augustus tulip.

There are flowers, and then there are flowers: flowers, I mean, around which whole cultures have sprung up, flowers with an empire's worth of history behind them, flowers whose form and color and scent, whose very genes carry reflections of people's ideas and desires through time like great books. It's a lot to ask of a plant, that it take on the changing colors of human dreams, and this may explain why only a small handful of them have proven themselves supple and willing enough for the task. The rose, obviously, is one such flower; the peony, particularly in the East, is another. The orchid certainly qualifies. And then there is the tulip. Arguably there are a couple more (perhaps the lily?), but these few have long been our canonical flowers, the Shakespeares, Miltons, and Tolstoys of the plant world, voluminous and protean, the select company of flowers that have survived the vicissitudes of fas.h.i.+on to make themselves sovereign and unignorable.

So what sets these flowers apart from the run of charming daisies and pinks and carnations, not to mention the legions of pretty wildflowers? Perhaps more than anything else, it is their multifariousness. Some perfectly good flowers simply are what they are, singular and, if not completely fixed in their ident.i.ty, capable of ringing only a few simple changes on it: hue, say, or petal count. Prod it all you want, select and cross and reengineer it, but there's only so much a coneflower or a lotus is ever going to do. Fas.h.i.+on is apt to pick up such a flower for a time and then drop it-think of the pink, or gillyflower, in Shakespeare's day or the hyacinth in Queen Victoria's-since it won't let itself be remade in some new image once its first one is pa.s.se.

By contrast, the rose, the orchid, and the tulip are capable of prodigies, reinventing themselves again and again to suit every change in the aesthetic or political weather. The rose, flung open and ravis.h.i.+ng in Elizabethan times, obligingly b.u.t.toned herself up and turned prim for the Victorians. When the Dutch decided the paragon of floral beauty was a marbleized swirl of vividly contrasting colors, the petals of their tulips became extravagantly "feathered" and "flamed." But then, when the English went in big for "carpet bedding" in the nineteenth century, the tulips duly allowed themselves to be turned into a paint box filled with the brightest, fattest dabs of pure pigment, suitable for ma.s.sing. These are the sorts of flowers that bear our oddest notions gladly. Of course, their willingness to take part in the moving game of human culture has proven a brilliant strategy for their success, for there are a lot more roses and tulips around today, in a lot more places, than there were before people took an interest in them. For a flower the path to world domination pa.s.ses through humanity's ever-s.h.i.+fting ideals of beauty.

It isn't automatically obvious that the tulip belongs in this august company of flowers, probably because, in its modern incarnation, the tulip is such a simple, one-dimensional flower, and its rich history of being so much more than that has largely been lost. Compared to the rose or the peony, flowers whose historical forms survive alongside their modern incarnations (both because the plants are so long-lived and because they can be cloned indefinitely), the only way we have any idea what made a tulip beautiful in Turkish or Dutch or French eyes is through those people's paintings and botanical ill.u.s.trations. That's because a tulip that falls out of favor soon goes extinct, since the bulbs don't reliably come back every year. In general a strain won't last unless it is regularly replanted, so the chain of genetic continuity can be broken in a generation. Even when people do continue to plant a particular tulip, the vigor of that variety (which is propagated by removing and planting the bulb's "offsets," the little, genetically identical bulblets that form at its base) eventually fades until it must be abandoned. Breeders today are busily seeking a new black tulip because they know the current standard-bearer-Queen of Night-is probably on her way out. Tulips, in other words, are mortal.

No tulip appears in the flower-crowded borders of medieval tapestries, nor is the flower ever mentioned in the early "herbals"-the Old World encyclopedias of the world's known plants and their uses. The fierceness of the pa.s.sion that the tulip unleashed in Holland in the seventeenth century (and to a lesser extent in France and England) may have had something to do with the flower's novelty in the West and the suddenness of its appearance. It is the youngest of our canonical flowers, the rose being the oldest.

Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, amba.s.sador of the Austrian Hapsburgs to the court of Suleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople, claimed to have introduced the tulip to Europe, sending a consignment of bulbs west from Constantinople soon after he arrived there in 1554. (The word tulip tulip is a corruption of the Turkish word for "turban.") The fact that the tulip's first official trip west took it from one court to another-that it was a flower favored by royalty-may also have contributed to its quick ascendancy, for court fas.h.i.+ons have always been especially catching. is a corruption of the Turkish word for "turban.") The fact that the tulip's first official trip west took it from one court to another-that it was a flower favored by royalty-may also have contributed to its quick ascendancy, for court fas.h.i.+ons have always been especially catching.

The tulip's is not a case where a plant had to travel the world before its virtues could be recognized at home: by the time of Busbecq's consignment, the tulip already had its own cult of admirers in the East, who had taken the flower a considerable distance from its form in the wild. There, it typically appears as a short, pretty, cheerful flower, a frank, open-faced, six-petaled star, often with a dramatic splotch of contrasting color at the base. Species tulips in Turkey typically come in red, less commonly in white or yellow. The Ottoman Turks had discovered that these wild tulips were great changelings, freely hybridizing (though it takes seven years before a tulip grown from seed flowers and shows its new colors) but also subject to mutations that produced spontaneous and wondrous changes in form and color. The tulip's mutability was taken as a sign that nature cherished this flower above all others. In his 1597 herbal, John Gerard says of the tulip that "nature seems to plaie more with this flower, than with any other that I do know."

The tulip's genetic variability has in fact given nature-or, more precisely, natural selection-a great deal to play with. From among the chance mutations thrown out by a flower, nature preserves the rare ones that confer some advantage-brighter color, more perfect symmetry, whatever. For millions of years such features were selected, in effect, by the tulip's pollinators-that is, insects-until the Turks came along and began to cast their own votes. (The Turks did not learn to make deliberate crosses till the 1600s; the novel tulips they prized were said simply to have "occurred.") Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower's point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring. Though we self-importantly regard domestication as something people have done to plants, it is at the same time a strategy by which the plants have exploited us and our desires-even our most idiosyncratic notions of beauty-to advance their own interests. Depending on the environment in which a species finds itself, different adaptations will avail. Mutations that nature would have rejected out of hand in the wild sometimes prove to be brilliant adaptations in an environment that's been shaped by human desire.

In the environment of the Ottoman Empire the best way for a tulip to get ahead was to have absurdly long petals drawn to a point fine as a needle. In drawings, paintings, and ceramics (the only place the Turks' ideal of tulip beauty survives; the human environment is an unstable one), these elongated blooms look as though they'd been stretched to the limit by a gla.s.sblower. The metaphor of choice for this form of tulip petal was the dagger. A successful Ottoman tulip also had to be pure in color and have smooth-edged petals held closely enough together to hide the anthers within, and it could never be "doubled"-have a superabundance of petals, in the way of a hybrid rose. Though these last traits are not uncommon in species tulips, attenuated petals are virtually unknown in the wild, which suggests that the Ottoman ideal of tulip beauty-elegant, sharp, and masculine-was freakish and hard-won and conferred no advantage in nature. (Very often traits that commend plants and animals to people render them less fit for life in the wild.) Beyond a certain point the Ottoman and insect ideals of tulip beauty no longer coincided.

For a time in the eighteenth century the bulbs of tulips that matched the Turkish ideal traded in Constantinople for quant.i.ties of gold. This was during the reign of Sultan Ahmed III, from 1703 to 1730, a period known to Turkish historians as the lale devri, lale devri, or Tulip Era. The sultan was ruled by his pa.s.sion for the flower, so much so that he imported bulbs by the millions from Holland, where the Dutch, after the pa.s.sing of their own tulipomania, had become masters of large-scale bulb production. The extravagance of the sultan's annual tulip festivals ultimately proved his downfall; the conspicuous waste of national treasure help