The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (28 page)

SOURCES

Listed below, by chapter, are the principal works referred to in the text, as well as others that supplied me with facts or influenced my thinking.

INTRODUCTION: THE HUMAN BUMBLEBEE

David Attenborough’s 1995 public television series
The Private Life of Plants
probably did more than any book to open my eyes to the natural and human world as seen from the plant’s point of view. The series’ brilliant time-lapse photography immediately makes you realize that our sense of plants as passive objects is a failure of imagination, rooted in the fact that plants occupy what amounts to a different dimension.

On the history of domestication and the relationship between plants and people, I found these books particularly illuminating:

Anderson, Edgar.
Plants, Man and Life
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952). A classic on the origins of agriculture.

Balick, Michael J., and Paul Alan Cox.
Plants, People and Culture: The Science of Ethnobotany
(New York: Scientific American Library, 1996).

Bronowski, J.
The Ascent of Man
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1973).

Budiansky, Stephen.
The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication
(New York: William Morrow, 1992).

Coppinger, Raymond P., and Charles Kay Smith. “The Domestication of Evolution,”
Environmental Conservation,
vol. 10, no. 4, Winter 1983, pp. 283–91. This essay puts domestication into the context of evolution, suggesting that what constitutes “fitness” in nature fundamentally changed during the Neolithic era.

Diamond, Jared.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). Excellent on the history and botany of domestication, why some species participate and others do not.

Eiseley, Loren.
The Immense Journey
(New York: Vintage Books, 1959). As much myth as science, this book manages to dramatize the rise of the angiosperms.

Nabhan, Gary Paul.
Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation
(San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989).

On the wider subject of evolution and natural selection:

Darwin, Charles.
The Origin of Species,
edited by J. W. Burrow (London: Penguin Books, 1968).

Dawkins, Richard.
The Selfish Gene
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

Dennett, Daniel C
. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

Goodwin, Brian.
How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994).

Jones, Steve.
Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated
(New York: Random House, 1999).

Ridley, Matt.
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
(New York: Penguin Books, 1993).

Wilson, E. O.
The Diversity of Life
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).

CHAPTER 1: THE APPLE

Though he probably won’t approve of the portrait of his hero I brought back with me, William Ellery (Bill) Jones was as generous, knowledgeable, and companionable a guide to Johnny Appleseed country as anyone could hope for. Bill also introduced me to several other people in Ohio and Indiana who helped me to piece together Chapman’s elusive story: Steven Fortriede at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne; Myrtle Ake, who showed me the Chapman family graveyard in Dexter City; and David Ferre, a pomologist with the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center.

The literary and historical record on John Chapman is remarkably thin. The indispensable source on Chapman’s life remains Robert Price’s 1954 biography,
Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth
(Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1967). Also indispensable is the 1871 account of Chapman’s life published by
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
(vol. 43, pp. 6–11). For showing me that Chapman was a historical figure worth taking seriously, I owe a debt to Edward Hoagland’s excellent
American Heritage
profile, “Mushpan Man,” which is reprinted in Hoagland’s essay collection
Heart’s Desire
(New York: Summit Books, 1988). For contemporary accounts of Chapman, I highly recommend
Johnny Appleseed: A Voice in the Wilderness,
an anthology of historical writings on Chapman edited by William Ellery Jones (West Chester, Pa.: Chrysalis Books, 2000). Also worth reading are Chapman’s obituary in the Fort Wayne
Sentinel
(March 22, 1845) and Steven Fortriede, “Johnny Appleseed: The Man Behind the Myth,”
Old Fort News
(vol. 41, no. 3, 1978).

On the botany, culture, and history of the apple, I profited from interviews and conversations with Bill Vitalis, formerly of the Ellsworth Hill Orchard in Connecticut; Clay Stark and Walter Logan at Stark Brothers Nurseries in Missouri; Tom Vorbeck at Applesource in Illinois; Terry and Judith Maloney at West County Cider in Massachusetts; and, at the USDA Experiment Station in Geneva, New York, Phil Forsline, Herb Aldwinckle, and Susan Brown.

These books on apples, sweetness, and environmental history were particularly helpful:

Beach, S. A.
The Apples of New York
(Albany: J. B. Lyon Company, 1905).

Browning, Frank.
Apples
(New York: North Point Press, 1998). Browning, an orchardist and journalist, traveled to Kazakhstan, visiting the apple’s center of diversity with Aimak Djangaliev.

Carlson, R. F., et al.
North American Apples: Varieties, Rootstocks, Outlook
(East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1970).

Childers, Norman F.
Modern Fruit Science
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1975).

Crosby, Alfred.
Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986). The preeminent environmental historian on the exchange of species between the Old World and New after Columbus.

———.
Germs, Seeds & Animals: Studies in Ecological History
(Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).

Haughton, Claire Shaver.
Green Immigrants: The Plants That Transformed America
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978).

Marranca, Bonnie, ed.
American Garden Writing
(New York: PAJ Publications, 1988).

Martin, Alice A.
All About Apples
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).

Mintz, Sidney W.
Sweetness and Power
(New York: Penguin Books, 1986).

Terry, Dickson. “The Stark Story: Stark Nurseries 150th Anniversary,” special issue of the
Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society,
September 1966.

Thoreau, Henry David. “Wild Apples,” in
The Natural History Essays,
introduction and notes by Robert Sattelmeyer (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1980).

Weber, Bruce.
The Apple in America: The Apple in 19th Century American Art
(New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1993). An exhibition catalog.

Yepson, Roger.
Apples
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1994).

On the subjects of Dionysus and Apollo (which also figure in subsequent chapters), I’ve relied primarily on Friedrich Nietzsche’s
The Birth of Tragedy
(London: Penguin Books, 1993; first published 1872) and Camille Paglia’s
Sexual Personae
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), a book brimming with insight for anyone who would write or think about nature. The following books were also helpful on Dionysus:

Dodds, E. R.
The Greeks and the Irrational
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951).

Frazer, Sir James.
The New Golden Bough
(New York: New American Library, 1959).

Harrison, Jane.
Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1922).

Kerenyi, Carl.
Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life,
trans. by Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).

Otto, Walter F.
Dionysus: Myth and Cult,
trans. by Robert B. Palmer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965).

Williams, C. K., trans.
The Bacchae of Euripides
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990).

CHAPTER 2: THE TULIP

On flowers in general, I consulted:

Goody, Jack.
The Culture of Flowers
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Huxley, Anthony.
Plant and Planet
(London: Penguin Books, 1987).

Proctor, Michael, et al.
The Natural History of Pollination
(Portland, Ore.: Timber Press, 1996).

On the biology and philosophy of beauty:

Etcoff, Nancy.
Survival of the Prettiest
(New York: Doubleday, 1999).

Nietzsche, Friedrich.
The Birth of Tragedy,
op. cit.

Paglia, Camille.
Sexual Personae,
op. cit.

Pinker, Steven.
How the Mind Works
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

Ridley, Matt.
The Red Queen,
op. cit.

Scarry, Elaine.
On Beauty and Being Just
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Turner, Frederick.
Beauty: The Value of Values
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991).

———.
Rebirth of Value: Meditations on Beauty, Ecology, Religion, and Education
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).

On tulips and the Dutch tulipomania, my principal source was Anna Pavord’s definitive and beautiful book,
The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad
(London: Bloomsbury, 1999). Also helpful were:

Baker, Christopher, and Willem Lemmers, Emma Sweeney, and Michael Pollan.
Tulipa: A Photographer’s Botanical
(New York: Artisan, 1999).

Chancellor, Edward.
Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). Chancellor is especially good tracing the parallels between market manias and carnivals.

Dash, Mike.
Tulipomania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused
(New York: Crown, 1999).

Dumas, Alexandre.
The Black Tulip
(New York: A. L. Burt Company, n.d.; first published 1850).