![]() ![]() (Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, who knew a thing or two about natural history, called it "the American fruit.") Yet there is a sense-a biological, not just metaphorical sense-in which this is, or has become, true, for the apple transformed itself when it came to America. ![]() In fact, the apple did such a convincing job of this that most of us wrongly assume the plant is a native. Like generations of other immigrants before and after, the apple has made itself at home here. The apple has been far more eager to do business with humans, and perhaps nowhere more so than in America. Evidently the oak has such a satisfactory arrangement with the squirrel-which obligingly forgets where it has buried every fourth acorn or so (admittedly, the estimate is Beatrix Potter's)-that the tree has never needed to enter into any kind of formal arrangement with us. Try as they might, people have never been able to domesticate the oak tree, whose highly nutritious acorns remain far too bitter for humans to eat. ![]() It takes two to perform that particular dance, after all, and plenty of plants and animals have elected to sit it out. Even the power over nature that domestication supposedly represents is overstated. We give ourselves altogether too much credit in our dealings with other species. ![]()
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