Plant Kinship In Plants

In the novel, The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan tells the intriguing story of how plants are domesticated from the perspective of the plant with regards to four specific plants.. The four plants he chose for discussion are the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. As he discusses the domestication of these plants, his overall focus is the desire that each of these plants have to us as humans. Pollan has written books and magazine articles among other pieces of literature that discuss the relationship between plants and humans. Throughout this informational text, Pollan tries to keep the perspective from the “plant’s-eye view of the world,” but he often slips into Pollan’s eye view of the world. As he talks about experiences that he has had with each of these plants and gives a little bit of their history, it was often hard to stay focused on the topic that he was trying to convey. However, I found that the perspectives that Pollan brings up are interesting to think about. The Botany of Desire was an interesting journal type informational novel that didn’t quite live up to my expectations of what it could have been.

Plants are found everywhere on earth, up high on the ridge and down low in caves and caverns. The types of plants that live in these places depends on many factors. These factors are separated into two different categories, the biotic factors and the abiotic factors. Some of the biotic factors include, predation, competition, and habitat destruction. Plants with limited competition and large amounts of resources will be in a higher abundance than plants with limited resources and higher competition rates will be confined to areas and either out competed or will be the dominant species. Certain plants adapt to these factors and thrive and others don’t do as well. Some of the abiotic factors include, sunlight, water, temperature, and wind. These

Everyone has a family of some kind. It may be the parents and siblings they were born with, or it could be the gang of six biologically unrelated elite drivers with an affinity for robbing banks at high speeds from Fast and the Furious. Ultimately, family is what people make of it, and it can be the ‘traditional’ two parents, one brother, one sister, and a dog named Spot, or it could be a woman and the kid she was left with. The term ‘traditional family' refers to the socially expected behaviors of each given role (for example, a mother taking her kid to the doctor,) in the family. Members of a traditional family in this case are either maritally or biologically related. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees has many characters who would consider themselves, or be considered, part of different families. The Bean Trees addresses and deals with the fact that nontraditional families can be just as strong as what society has defined as a ‘traditional’ family.

A symbiotic relationship is a mutually beneficial interaction between two or more people, in which both involved gain something from the relationship. The overall symbol of the wisteria vines in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees is an example of a symbiotic relationship. By working together for a shared survival, both the rhizobia and the wisteria vines are able to better thrive in their environment and achieve a balance that is only possible by the two factors working together. Kingsolver’s symbiotic relationships throughout The Bean Trees show how people can develop stronger relationships by working together and by developing systems of support for each other, much like the rhizobia and the wisteria vines.

Symbiotic Mutualisms: Plant provide energy and protection to the fungus while the fungus helps the plant absorb nutrients from the soil.

From a diagram of an idealized flower, correctly label the following structures and describe the function of each structure:

Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s View of the World, addresses four major plant groups that have both changed for human needs and simultaneously changed human’s needs. While most gardeners, genetic engineers and other plant related professionals have long-believed that plants have evolved based on what we want or need to survive and in other words what we have “domesticated”, Pollan appeals to the plant’s view. Plants’ survival has been solely based on what humans desire both depending on their visual and stimulatory appeal along with their appeal to an appetite. Conversely, plants have used humans as a strategy for “getting us to move and think for them (page xx)”. Many plants have successfully maneuvered humans for

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollen uses examples of four plants including the apple ,tulip, marijuana, and the potato, to describe evolution and how mankind works to help plants reproduce. We are a slave to things of sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control. These four things are described by the different plant chapters in the book. We as people are driven to these kind of things because of the product we get, we subconsciously are working to make these plants more fit and therefore helping in their reproduction and evolution. With each plant chapter Pollen goes into depth about its contribution to the world and history behind the plant within human evolution. By using the examples he provides in the book helps demonstrate the ideas of how these plants contribute to the human body systems, evolution and ecology. To further explain these topics I chose to explore the apple, tulip and cannabis plants.

Hummingbirds have a symbiotic relationship with plants. They have a mutualistic relationship because they both benefit from it. The hummingbird gets nectar from flowers which also helps the flower because it is being pollinated. Many flowers have a tube-like shape which makes it hard for bees to get nectar from them. This benefits the hummingbird because they will have a reliable source of

With agriculture came domestication. Domestication is defined as humans changing the environment and the ecosystems within the environment in order to make the Earth safer for humans and to gain more beneficial and productive goods and services (Kareiva et al., 2007). Domestication can be categorized to two big branches: domestication of plants and domestication of animals. Humans facilitated domestication of plants through agricultural practices. Through artificial selection, humans chose domesticate plants with traits that are most advantageous for humans’ survival, usually those that yield the most food (Young, 2016). When these traits are selected repeatedly, domesticated crops resulted in differing both physiologically and morphologically from its ancestor species. Domestication suggests enlargement of plant structure. Bigger plant structure prompts an increase in abundance and likelihood of herbivores that may feed off of these domesticated crops. Increase in seed size also negatively correlates with toughness of seed coat. This relationship indicates that more parasites are able to prey on these weak domesticated crops (Chen, 2015). Shang et al. (2014) also establish a specific example and write that humans have purposefully domesticated cucumbers without the bitter taste, which protected the species from herbivores. Without the bitter taste, the cucumber species is now defenseless against herbivores

If one were to ask my friends what stands out about me, they would immediately refer to the strange dichotomy that exists within me. On the one hand, both of my parents are agronomists and have spent their entire lives trying to improve the yield of the plants that feed the world. On the other hand, I don’t want to follow them--I want to study government. At the same time, I have a serious fascination with the obscurities that connect plants, such as the fact that Balsa trees share a taxonomic family with the Marsh Mallow, the plant from whose root the fluffy treat of the same name was originally derived. Yet my greatest fascination lies in the Ginkgo tree. Ginkgoes are not adapted to modern life at all. In fact, Ginkgo biloba is more than

Plants do have similar behavior patterns to animals. They both can fight over territory, food, they can tell if they’re relatives and they both have defense mechanisms. This shows you how plants and animals have similar behaviors like how the knapweed fights for territory

If I had to choose one question to ask about how the world works it would be this. How can we be so eager to explore our plant and at the same time not bat an eye at destroying it?

Humans depend on plants in numerous ways. One reason we depend on plants is for consumption. Plants have the unique ability of producing their own food through a process called photosynthesis. In this process, plants are able to produce macromolecules such as carbohydrates that cannot be produced in animals or humans. In humans, the only to gain these macromolecules is to consume plant matter, or consume plant-eating animals (herbivores).

Human observers of nature are familiar with the communication among animal species. For example, a bird’s call may alert others to a predator, or a wolf’s howl-bark may help coordinate a hunt (Wolf Talk, 2015). Less obvious, however, is the wondrous ways in which other creatures- fungi and plants- communicate and share resources. These interactions may be symbiotic and thus mutually beneficial.