Our first book is: Botony of Desire
We are reading one chapter a month to make it easier for us to keep up. Lets discuss after our first meeting.

Melinda, Renee and I met on Thursday for our first meeting. Fortunately, Pliny was there to watch the kids otherwise we wouldn't have gotten a word in edgewise :)

I had a few take-away thoughts about the chapter on Apples.

* All apples are produced from trees that have been grafted (cloned) rather than from seeds. Seeds are too volatile. All commercially sold apples originate from one of six trees!

* Johnny Appleseed was able to sells his apple trees as the frontier expanded, not for the fruit, but for the alcoholic cider it produced. It wasn't until prohibition, and a clever marketing scheme to save the orchards, that the phrase "An apple a day keeps the doctor away" came into our lives.

My thoughts on the apple chapter

I was blown away by how different Johnny Appleseed actually was compared to his folklore. He was called a crank by many, a vegetarian, liked to live outdoors (almost homeless), and almost had a child bride! Very different from his wholesome story that was portrayed.

That aside, the idea that mainstream supermarkets only sell 6 versions of apples, just seems tragic. There are many more ancient varieties we are not tasting. I am happy there is one place in the world in New York, where we can go to an apple orchard museum and find apple ancestors some of which are purple and blue! With many flavors too!

Heterozygosity. I was glad for Pollan's introduction to this botanical term for how FAR fruit may fall from trees (true for humans, EXTREME in apples). Pollan dwells on the genetic variability of the Apple SEED -- its "ineluctable wildness" -- to help us grasp the not only improbability of household apples like "Red Delicious" -- originally an irrepressible sprout sprung between the rows of an Iowa Quaker's orchard -- but also the Dionysian frontier American propagation/cultivation of apples from seed for HOOCH & hard cider (note: HMB orchards quenched SF thirst for decades - TCR has many old cider orchards, e.g. the "Yellow bellflower" are fat, juicy & sweet, but do not travel well for market displays). Clearly, the disneyfied version of the Johnny Appleseed legend contributes to our collective ignorance of plants and biodiversity, not to mention U.S. history!!

Pollan's description of the wild apple forests in Kazakhstan was my favorite portion of this chapter. Apples coming up in between the cracks of sidewalks, apples big as oaks, with impalpable many-colored fruits, some like leather-coated mushy brazil nuts!?

I have to add that I also enjoyed Pollan's repositioning of "sweetness" along an historical axis of human taste (pp 17-18).

Am looking forward to the next chapter, on Tulips...

From Swift, whose Battle of the Books gave us the figure of "sweetness and light" : "...such order from confusion sprung, /
such gaudy tulips raised from dung."

It was just Kelly and I for the Tulip Chapter this week, but we had a good time! We may have talked more about other things than the book chapter. We shared chocolate as we chatted.
I thought the chapter on Tulips was not as interesting as the Apple chapter except for a few things. He repeats his theme that maybe the plants or even disease is using us to proliferate and help it spread its genes.
The idea that it was more desired to posess a rare tulip bulb such as the 'black' tulip, than to sell it for large sums of money was very intriguing. It sounded like many who refused to sell the most rare bulbs for any price often had them stolen. It was the thieves who helped spread the tulip genes in the long run.
I really found it interesting that a disease caused a beautiful color phenotype or 'break' to appear in illing plants. It made the this type of tulip very desirable for a while until they found out it was caused by a disease which was actually reducing the reproduction of that type of tulip and would end up causing it to become extinct.
Other interesting things to note is that we may know little about the different varieties of flowers that existed in the past because many went extinct due to human medelling (sp?). Seems in some cases the only way we know are from paintings or famous legends.
That's it for me. Anyone else have comments?