Free The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world by Michael Pollan Page A

variety discovered in America since the Roxbury Russet distinguished itself in a cider orchard outside Boston in 1645.
    The Geneva orchard is, among other things, a museum of the apple’s golden age in America, and a few weeks after my trip to the Midwest, I traveled here, alone, to see what of Johnny Appleseed’s legacy I might find in its corridors. At first glance the orchard looks much like any other, the tidy rows of grafted trees advancing like rails to the horizon. But it doesn’t take long before you begin to notice the stupendous variety of these trees—in color, leaf, and branching habit—and the metaphor of a library begins to fit: endless shelves of books that are alike only superficially. When I visited, it was late October, and most of the trees were bent with ripe fruit, though many others had already dropped stunning cloaks of red and yellow and green on the ground around them.
    I spent the better part of a morning browsing the leafy aisles, tasting all the famous old varieties I’d read about—the Esopus Spitzenberg and Newtown Pippin, the Hawkeye and the Winter Banana. Almost all of these classic varieties were chance seedlings found in exactly the sort of cider orchards John Chapman sponsored, and no doubt there are apples in this orchard that came from the seeds he planted in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. There’s just no way of knowing which ones they are.
    As I worked my way up and down the aisles, consulting a computerized directory that the collection’s curator, Phil Forsline, had printed out for me, I concentrated on the varieties listed as “American” and thought about exactly what that meant. By planting so many apples from seed, Americans like Chapman had, willy-nilly, conducted a vast evolutionary experiment, allowing the Old World apple to try out literally millions of new genetic combinations, and by doing so to adapt to the new environment in which the tree now found itself. Every time an apple failed to germinate or thrive in American soil, every time an American winter killed a tree or a freeze in May nipped its buds, an evolutionary vote was cast, and the apples that survived this great winnowing became ever so slightly more American.
    A somewhat different kind of vote was then cast by the discriminating orchardist. Whenever a tree growing in the midst of a planting of nameless cider apples somehow distinguished itself—for the hardiness of its constitution, the redness of its skin, the excellence of its flavor—it would promptly be named, grafted, publicized, and multiplied. Through this simultaneous process of natural and cultural selection, the apples took up into themselves the very substance of America—its soil and climate and light, as well as the desires and tastes of its people, and even perhaps a few of the genes of America’s native crab apples. In time all these qualities became part and parcel of what an apple in America is.
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    In the years after John Chapman began plying his trade through the Midwest, America witnessed what has sometimes been called the Great Apple Rush. People scoured the countryside for the next champion fruit. The discovery of a Jonathan or Baldwin or Grimes Golden could bring an American fortune and even a measure of fame, and every farmer tended his cider orchard with an eye to the main chance: the apple that would hit it big. “Every wild apple shrub excites our expectations thus,” Thoreau wrote, “somewhat as every wild child. It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. What a lesson to man! . . . Poets and philosophers and statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the hosts of unoriginal men.”
    The nationwide hunt for pomological genius, the odds of which were commonly held to be eighty thousand to one, brought forth literally hundreds of new varieties, including most of the ones I was now tasting. I can report, however, that not all these children of Chapman are outstanding to eat: many of the