“Until I read Michael Pollan’s original, provocative and charming The Botany of Desire, I had never managed to get inside the soul of a plant. Mr. Pollan, an accomplished gardener and garden writer, presents a plant’s-eye view of the world that challenged some of my most basic assumptions about gardening, particularly the one about whether I control my lilies or they control me. Mr. Pollan disabused me of my anthropocentric ignorance. In his elegant sections on marijuana and potatoes, Mr. Pollan braids together cosmic ideas, conversations with experts and day-to-day reports from his own garden. Mr. Pollan’s discussion of the genetically engineered NewLeaf potato, which was devised to resist its most dreaded enemy, the Colorado potato beetle, is a lucid and balanced assessment of this new horticultural technology, a subject too often tackled with barely muffled hysteria.”
The Wall Street Journal
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