The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world Read Online Free PDF

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 identity—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 passage, 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 Flushing, 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 sexual reproduction, that is, and going to seed—the apple was able to reach down into its vast store of genes, accumulated 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.
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    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 lustily 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