The Botany of Desire

The book that I read was The Botany of Desire. I personally found this book to be very very interesting, it forced me to think of plants in a different manner. Never before had it occurred to me that plants could be using people the same ways that plants use bees to spread and become more populated. In the book it focuses on four main plants the apple, the tulip, the potato, and the marijuana plant. Each plant represents a desire that humans have the apple represents sweetness, the tulip beauty, marijuana intoxication, and the potato is control. Pollan the author starts off talking about how the apple attracts are desire of sweetness. The book talks about how the apple originated in Kazakhstan and slowly made its way through Europe and then to America. Then it talks about Johnny Appleseed's journey across America spreading the apple tree. After that it talks about all of the uses the apple has had since and how popular it is. The reason the apple is so popular is because of how its natural sweetness is so rare and how it represents that it is healthy and good for humans. The next plant is the tulip. The tulip represents the desire of beauty. The tulip is specifically attractive to humans because of its contrast to its surrounding and its variation. The next plant is marijuana. This represents the human desire for change in consciousness. The plant itself is very adaptable to its situations so humans take advantage of it. They even risk their lives and freedom for it. People are so drawn to the high that they receive from marijuana that it has such a popular market people will risk everything to get their hands on it. The final plant talked about is the potato plant. This plant specifically is very representative of the humans desire to control everything. This is specifically an appropriate thing to control because it is a great sense of food for humans. If people can control food then they can pretty much control their own destiny.
I found this book to be very interesting and I personally really enjoyed how it opened my eyes to a new look at the relationship between humans and plants. I had to skim through certain parts of the book because i felt like some of it was unnecessary details but for the most part I was very interested by the details the story goes into about the plants. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in understanding the relationship between humans and the plants we surround ourselves with.