The Botany of Desire

Tune in to WGVU TV
Wednesday, October 28 at 8 p.m.

Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: to make their honey, the bees collect nectar, and in the process spread pollen, which contains the flowers' genes. The Botany of Desire proposes that people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. "We don't give nearly enough credit to plants," says best-selling author Michael Pollan, whose book of the same name is the inspiration for the program. "They've been working on us - they've been using us - for their own purposes."

The Botany of Desire examines this unique relationship through the stories of four familiar species, telling how each evolved to satisfy one of our most basic yearnings. Linking our fundamental desires for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control with the plants that gratify them - the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato - The Botany of Desire shows that we humans are intricately woven into the web of nature, not standing outside it.

"The Botany of Desire is a perfect story for television," says producer/director Michael Schwarz. "It takes a world we thought we knew, and allows us to see it in an entirely new way." Shot in stunning high definition photography, the program begins with Michael Pollan in a California garden and sets off to roam the world: from the potato fields of Idaho and Peru to the apple orchards of New England; from a medical marijuana hot house to the tulip mecca of Amsterdam, where in 1637, one Dutchman, crazed with "tulip mania," paid as much for a single tulip bulb as the going price for a town house. How could flowers, with no real practical value to humans, become so desperately desired that they drove many to financial ruin?

The Botany of Desire argues that the answer lies in the powerful but often overlooked relationship between people and plants. With Pollan as our on-screen guide to this frankly sensuous natural world, The Botany of Desire explores the dance of domestication between humans and plants. Through the history of these four familiar plants, the film seeks to answer the question: Who has really been domesticating whom?