The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world by Michael Pollan

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 passion.
    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 canal 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 passion 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 for the flowers? How did these organs of plant sex 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 beeline, though, one that makes a great many stops along its way.
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    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 space, but what was the point? The flowers I welcomed into my garden were precisely the ones that had a point, that foretold the fruit to come: the pretty white-and-yellow button