Botany of Desire: A plant’s eye view of the world - By Michael Pollan

The human view of development of agriculture is straightforward – we preferred specific grains and fruits as our food and we started growing more and more of those. But how does this look from the view of the plants? How did they make humans chose them from the plentiful choice? How did they cultivate us as advanced form of bees and birds to spread their genes?
I picked up Botany of Desire tempted by its promise to provide interesting insights into evolution from the plant’s point of view. Here is my experience.
The book is filled with interesting tidbits and views. Look at this comment on the impact of commercialization of apple cultivation: An apple tree grown from the seed  produces a very different fruit from what the seed came from. Hence the natural forests and the original orchards that grew apple trees from the seeds were home for an incredible variety of the fruit – varying in taste, smell, shape, size and color. Now the commercialization has limited the choice to a handful of varieties using grafting. Here is one point that I am not very sure about – is this specific to apple, or is it applicable in general to commercial production of any fruit? Take mangoes in India. Though a mango tree grown from a specific fruit mostly bears mangoes similar to the seed mango, there were a wide variety of mangoes differing in size, smell, taste, color and texture. This variety of mangoes is today giving way to a handful of commercially available, mostly grafted selection.
Are there other impacts of our intervention in evolution? By handpicking the tastier fruits (as against pest-resistant ones) and by preventing mutation by grafting are we making these trees more vulnerable to pests? Is this the cause for increasing need for pesticides? According to the author, yes, yes and yes.
Here is an interesting piece of information from the section on tulips. Africans do not seem to be attracted to the beauty of flower. The author suspects it’s because there aren't as many flowers in Africa compared to other continents. But is there an evolutionary reason for the flower-embargo practiced by African plants? What is the alternative to pollination for these plants? Unfortunately the book does not explore these questions further. I am attracted more by the scent of a flower than by its beauty. Is this just a personal trait or does it have anything to do with the flowers from where I come?
There were some points in the section on flowers that I could not fully appreciate or agree with.
• Evolutionarily, the author claims that we are attracted to flowers because those who are attracted to flowers had a better chance of finding food – as flowers precede fruits. If that was the case, the flowers that result in fruits or in any other kind of food must appear more attractive than the ones that do not. Apple blossoms should have been celebrated for beauty rather than the ‘useless’ tulip, rose, lotus, daffodil, or lily.
• I think he made another error when he tried to explain in evolutionary terms why a specific infected flower appears more attractive to human eye than a ‘healthy’ one. Since human intervention augments natural selection in this case the human preference should be considered as a measure of ‘fitness’. The evolutionary question to ask here is why the defect appeared attractive to human eye – and the answer is to be found in the evolution of humans and not in the evolution of the plant or the germ.
I enjoyed reading this book because it made me think and it made me ask a lot of questions. It did not answer many of these questions, but I guess that is okay. In some of the cases the answers provided did not fully satisfy me, but I guess that is okay as well. My biggest disappointment was that it did not fully deliver on its promise of providing a plant's eye view.