Botany of Desire, The 2x52

Botany of Desire tells the utterly original story of four everyday plants and the way they have domesticated humankind. In 1983 Michael Pollan and his wife left New York City to make a new home on an abandoned dairy farm. Pursuing a childhood fascination with gardening and an old-fashioned hubris about his ability to control nature, Pollan set about creating a garden. He had no way of knowing that it would eventually lead him to an original and provocative re-interpretation of the relationship between plants and people. This two-hour documentary, based on Pollan’s best selling book The Botany of Desire, takes viewers from the potato fields of Peru and Idaho to the apple forests of Kazakhstan, from the tulip markets of Amsterdam to the medical marijuana grow rooms of the United States. Along the way, the program will explore the natural history of the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato—and the human desires that link their destinies to our own.

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