Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.

Updike’s line anthropomorphizes the tomato plant to capture a paradox of vitality and vulnerability. Tomatoes grow quickly, sprawl, and fruit abundantly—traits that can read as “eager”—yet they bruise easily, invite blight, and can collapse into rot almost overnight. By calling them “the most human,” he links garden biology to human experience: our appetites and ambitions coexist with physical fragility and inevitable decay. The sentence also reflects Updike’s characteristic attention to the sensuous particulars of ordinary life, using a domestic, seasonal observation to gesture toward mortality and the precariousness of flourishing.