Behind the Green Door

Chapter 14 explores literary and scientific reactions to the idea of sex in plants. England experienced a fashion for “phytoerotica”: bawdy verse, in which plants represented human genitalia, and classically inspired poetry, in which stamens and pistils were personified as husbands, wives and lovers. The former had little to do with plants. The latter served to teach the Linnaean sexual classification system. In reaction, some botanists rejected both the sexual theory and the Linnaean system. Two camps developed, the “sexualists” and the “asexualists”. J.G. Siegesbeck railed, “[Who] will ever believe that God Almighty should have introduced such…shameful whoredom for the propagation of the reign of plants.” The negative impact of the sexual system on the morals of women became the asexualist’s rallying cry. In 1759, the Pope banned all Linnaeus’s books and ordered them burned. Nevertheless, Erasmus Darwin’s “Loves of Plants,” with its fascinating female plant characters, was a hit.