I picked up The Botany of Desire at the library following txkimmers's recommendation. This is an incredibly cool set of four essays on plants and people: apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes.

Pollan does a great job turning around our usual view of "domesticated" plants. We usually see ourselves manipulating plants to serve our needs, making the plant just another tool. As he points out, plants aren't just hapless bystanders here. They have their own agenda, to reproduce!, and every plant that finds a way to get humans to help it along is using us, too.

There's some great stories here. I had no idea Johnny Appleseed was such a character, and so totally different from the image that our grade-school books promote. The exploration of Monsanto's genetically engineered potato -- how they make them, how they're grown, why they're attractive to the US market -- was both creepy and cool. Do I really want to be eating these? And how will I even know? ( )

I read a lot of books discussing how plants and bees or other pollinators evolved to fufill each other's needs, but hadn't really though about plants & people.
Enjoyed this one a lot, it explores the human relationship with apples, marijuana, tulips and potatoes ( )

So far, I always finds Pollan's take on things to be informative and transformative. ( )

I always both read more in the spring and enjoy reading more, because I have what feels like infinite plane time during my annual conference binge. Some books really benefit, and I think this is one -- Pollan was quite dry in parts of his exploration of the culture relationship between humans and cultivated plants and I'm not sure I would have been able to maintain interest without a plane ride sprawling in front of me.

The dryness of the writing, which in my opinion arose from bizarre literary choices, like the need to categorize every human instinct and plant behavior into Dionysian or Apollan (because...actually I never figured it out. I think it was to contrast chaos in the natural world with artificial imposition of order. But I think you can do that while still consigning Dionysus to the books about grapes.) Once I got past that, the book was actually quite good. I usually am terrified of books invoking evolutionary concepts because it's just so poorly done in most popular literature, but Pollan has a very good grasp on genetics; often he first offers an anthropomorphized or simplified hypothesis about why a trait such as sweetness evolved and then goes deeper to explore how that would actually be a competitive advantage for a plant carrying a specific gene.

I thought it was extremely interesting that most of the plants in the book were plants that don't "breed true" (i.e. have a sexual reproductive pattern resulting in genetically diverse offspring), such as apples and tulips, and how the extreme diversity that results within a single species of plant turns out to be a strong advantage. Pollen argues that this is particularly true as an artificial advantage because it makes plants adapt more quickly to human demands for cultivation. Interesting, but not completely convincing.

Anyway, I found the individual stories of each plant also interesting, in particular the story of the apple, how it was first used almost entirely for alcohol on the American frontier and the Johnny Appleseed story and the story of the tulip and the Dutch tulip mania. I was less convinced by the exploration of marijuana, which had a strong focus on why humans would evolve an endogenous cannabinoid pathway that I found overly speculative. Potatoes, the Irish potato famine and genetically-modified organisms was done in a less speculative manner and I thought Pollan explored the differences between the artificial selection already introduced in the book with GMOs in a very even-handed manner. ( )

Pollan's books always sound more fascinating than they end up being for me. I did enjoy this, but I go in to these forgetting he is a journalist, not a scientist, so this is more fluff and social commentary than actual botany. I like the selection of plants he picked, apples, tulips, cannabis, and potato. There was a lot of droning on about Johnny Appleseed in the apple section, which I found strange given he was US based and apples aren't native to here. I know this book is over 20 years old, but he does make refence to esk*mos, which is known to be a slur for Inuit and other Northern Indigenous people. I don't quite understand the title still, as this seems to be just short histories of the four plants he picked, but it was still a fun peak at the world of growing and using those plants. ( )