I just finished Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire and wanted to share some excerpts on the section about beauty and tulips—especially the Queen of Night tulip.

“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” (p. 68-9).

[Photos by Screen Deb and gwiwer]

“Queen of Night is as close to black as a flower gets, though in fact is is a dark and glossy maroonish purple. Its hue is so dark, however, that it appears to draw more light into itself than it reflects, a kind of floral black hole. … For Dumas the black tulip was a synecdoche for tulipomania itself, an indifferent and arbitrary mirror in which a perverse consensus of meaning and value came briefly and disastrously into focus” (p. 92-93).

“The canonical flowers seem to me almost all female—except, that is, for the tulip, perhaps the most masculine of flowers. If you doubt this, watch next April how a tulip forces its head up out of the ground, how the head gradually colors as it rises. Dig down along the shaft, and you’ll find its bulb, smooth, rounded, hard as a nut, a form for which the botanists offer a most graphic term: ‘testiculate’” (p. 98-99).

This is easily one of my favorite books. Pollan’s writing is clear and simple, yet beautiful and his ideas and conclusions—especially while intoxicated in the name of “research”—are fascinating. I appreciated the nuanced botany information but really fell in love with his ideas of order and disorder à la Apollo and Dionysus. It’s difficult to say what my favorite chapter was, but needless to say, there’s something for everyone: sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control.

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