“These Lusting, Incestuous, Perverse Creatures”: A Phytopoetic History of Plants and Sexuality

Abstract

This article traces the emergence of and shifts in ideas about plant sexuality in European literature from the late seventeenth century to the present, with a particular focus on influential British and a few less well-known German texts. Positioned as a specifically phytopoetic history of plants and sexuality, it demonstrates with the help of literature how plants have been shaping human culture—in this context, the sociocultural norms and understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality. Moving from vegetal visions of virtuous, virginal women-plants and their corruption by pollen and “plant prostitutes” to concerns about “crimes against nature” and the persecution of male same-sex desire, this history ultimately arrives at queer reproduction and pleasure as a collective endeavor.

What does it mean to smell a flower? It might be a human response to a token of love, gratitude, or mourning; or it could signify a solitary moment of connecting with nature. Yet from the point of view of the flower, it is always also a sexual encounter. The plant’s colorful display and scent are attractive and pleasurable to humans, and we respond by smelling its reproductive organs. In terms of consequences, sticking our noses into plant genitals might lead to allergic reactions for humans, but it also holds the potential of pollination for plants. There are multiple ways of vegetal reproduction, both asexual and sexual, and the latter is inextricably bound up with the attraction of pollinators, which can be anything that moves: animals, wind, water, machines, humans.

In this article, I map a history of real and imagined sexual encounters between plants and humans. I consider both human and plant understandings of sexuality (involving reproduction, pleasure, desire, and more), and while descriptions of such encounters appear predominantly in the form of literary texts, I also point to a few performance art projects that realize human-plant sex. This article traces the emergence of and shifts in ideas about plant sexuality in European literature from the late seventeenth century to the present, focusing on particularly influential British texts and less well-known writing from my area of expertise in German studies, with a sprinkling of central French contributions and more recent US materials, which, together, poignantly represent the development of a shared Western discourse about plants and sexuality. I argue that the imaginative and poetic powers of literature are, in fact, crucial for the ways in which plants have been shaping human culture—specifically the sociocultural norms and understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality. Ultimately, this article shows how plants have been broadening human understandings of sex and sexuality in productive ways, and it demonstrates that when it comes to plants, sex is on the human mind.

I have been calling the shaping of human culture by plants phytopoetics.¹ It is the impact of plants on the human imagination, which is then expressed and multiplied in myriad ways in language and other, often creative media. The umbrella definition of phytopoetics has room for many ways of plant impact on the imaginative capacities of humans. Whether it happens in the form of biosemiosis and writing or inscription into an artwork, as Patrícia Vieira has conceptualized as phytographia, or whether it is an act of phytopoiesis that involves the collaborative making of poetry with plants, as John C. Ryan demonstrates in theory and practice, phytopoetics is a capacious category.²

In my own work, which defines phytopoetics in analogy to existing research in zoopoetics, I have so far focused primarily on vegetal eroticism and vegetal violence in literature as two specific examples of phytopoetics, while emphasizing the role of the cultural imagination and the phytopoetic impact on cultural developments writ large.³ The impact of plants on the imagination, as the following sections demonstrate, does not stay restricted to the realm of literature, since metaphors and other poetic expressions both come from and feed back into other cultural realms. The materials in this article show that the way plants behave and are imagined in respect to sexuality have been actively shaping human ideas about sex, gender, and sexual behaviors over the last few centuries.⁴ Changes in how humans understand and imagine plants have prompted imaginative shifts with new poetic imagery that is not only used in literature but also permeates scientific and everyday discourse—and hence shapes culture. The following literary-cultural history of human-plant sexuality is therefore one of phytopoetic agency—of plants changing the way humans think, talk, and write about vegetal beings and, by extension, about themselves.

Sex Symbols: From Female Flowers to Marriage Metaphors

Plants have served as symbols for love and desire in various literary and artistic traditions for centuries. Poetry is full of images that speak of attraction, courtship, and libidinous fulfillment in flowery terms, from rosy lips to defloration. Most of the time, these ideas are not about plants themselves but serve as encoded ways of speaking about human sexual behaviors, and plants play merely a symbolic or allegorical role. At most, the expression of love might be accompanied by plants in the form of a bouquet, perfume, or aphrodisiac to enhance the courtship ritual, but flowers are not the object of affection themselves. Indeed, while plants are arguably not conceived of as sexual beings in mainstream everyday discourse to this day, the existence of sexual reproduction in plants only came to be widely understood in the seventeenth century. As Lincoln and Lee Taiz show in Flora Unveiled: The Discovery and Denial of Sex in Plants, the role of pollen was not well recognized before then, and plants were therefore mostly thought to reproduce asexually and/or only have one sex. This sex was associated with women in a variety of cultural contexts, and in this one-sex model, plants were linked with chastity and virginity—such as the lily symbolizing the Virgin Mary, who represented immaculate conception, or Daphne turning into a tree to escape Apollo’s advances.⁵ Flowers therefore represented both women and the idea of their sexuality as nonsexual. At the same time, flower symbolism and metaphors created a space to discuss in an encoded way what was often called love, but can also be thought of as female sexuality. The rose came to be the perhaps most common symbol for all the nuances of love, ranging from the exceedingly popular but also provocative thirteenth-century medieval French poem Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose) to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s oft-sung “Heideröslein” (“Little Rose on the Heath,” 1771/1789) and beyond. While equating flowers with women and vice versa might seem like a primarily artistic convention from today’s point of view, the one-sex model made this idea just as much part of early scientific understandings, which rendered it particularly pervasive as a cultural concept.

The discovery of the two-sex model of plant reproduction—a process drawn out across countries and centuries until it reflected the intricacies of plant reproduction more accurately—changed this way of thinking and speaking about gender, sexuality, and plants. What had been symbolic language for female sexuality now became not only meaningful for a fuller spectrum of human sexual behaviors but also factored in the plants themselves in much more nuanced ways. Scientists once again turned to metaphors to describe their new knowledge about plants and its implications for the ways people were conceiving of human gender and sexuality. Describing flower parts as brides, grooms, and bed chambers, the poetic language of Linnaeus’s taxonomy of plants most famously popularized their sexual reproduction and caused moral outrage.⁶ Drawing on a binary concept of female and male, Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735) presented a taxonomy of the vegetal world based on the distribution of plant sexes and the resulting methods of reproduction. He showed plants to have twenty-four different sex combinations, in addition to multiple ways of achieving sexual and asexual reproduction. This natural diversity was a moral malformity to the minds of eighteenth-century readers, since plants that can reproduce with themselves, change sex, and contain simultaneously male and female genitals undermined then prevalent ideas of heteronormative, monogamous sexuality limited to the bounds of marriage.⁷ Despite or perhaps precisely because of Linnaeus’s traditional choice of metaphors about love and matrimony in his discussion of plants, the contrast to earlier conceptions of flowers as virginal, sexless women was shocking on multiple levels: suddenly, plants had become promiscuous sexual beings, men had to situate themselves in a realm they considered feminine, and what’s more, plants showed a whole range of amoral sexual identities and behaviors to be natural.

These discoveries had effects on both science and literature. Ann B. Shteir, Sam George, and other scholars have shown that botany became a popular but also improper pursuit among enlightenment women.⁸ Floriculture in the form of botanical drawing, molding, and embroidering as well as floral fashion designs, flower pressing, collecting, and gardening had been common activities for eighteenth-century, primarily upper-class ladies from Mary Delaney all the way to the British royal family; yet the scientific pursuit of plants in the form of botany now had women not only enter the male domain of the sciences but also engage with sexuality. Since flowers had been thought of as women for so long, the sexual system changed the way not only plants but also female sexuality was understood, aligning women botanists with the suddenly promiscuous flowers: “botany becomes a discourse of female sexuality in eighteenth-century literature.”⁹ The conception of flowers as aesthetically pleasing ornaments associated with passivity had shaped the image of women and gender roles for such a long time through floral metaphors that literature had to account for this phytopoetic change in the perception of plants, women, and their sexualities. At the same time, the imagery of women as passive, beautiful flowers also became a target of feminism. Mary Wollstonecraft, for instance, approved of women studying botany in her Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and used flower metaphors already in the first paragraph of her introduction and throughout the text:

In turn, Wollstonecraft was blamed for the “unsexing” of such female “flowers” by the likes of country clergyman Richard Polwhele, who held both feminism and the study of botany responsible for the loss of what he considered to be feminine behaviors, such as modesty, in his satirical poem “The Unsex’d Females” (1798): “With bliss botanic as their bosoms heave, / Still pluck forbidden fruit, with mother Eve, / For puberty in signing florets pant, / Or point the prostitution of a plant; / Dissect its organ of unhallow’d lust, / And fondly gaze the titillating dust.”¹¹ The desire for “forbidden fruit” from the tree of knowledge is supposedly so exciting that it makes the women botanists’ “bosoms heave” “with bliss” (suggesting sexualization rather than unsexing), while they keep the company of “plant prostitutes.” In popular patriarchal tradition, the flower that was once the virginal Madonna has now become the proverbial “whore”—and nobody but temptress Eve is to blame. Female desire for knowledge and vegetal “lust” are conflated as inappropriate (even bordering on the criminal with the reference to sex work), while the botanists’ “fond gaze” onto pollen might even suggest erotic desire for plants themselves.

Both botany as a discipline and the plant metaphors circulating phytopoetically in the sciences and literature became contested spaces for negotiating gender roles and female sexuality. Polwhele’s poem is just one example of the effect that the discovery of the two-sex model had on eighteenth-century culture. The new understanding of flowers as sexual beings who involved everything that moved in their pollination prompted the production of literature and images that engaged playfully with the sexual connotations of the newfound topic. Perhaps most famously, British poet and naturalist Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, wrote The Loves of Plants (1789), a poem that illustrates the Linnean sexual system by anthropomorphizing plants. Against other trends, Darwin emphasized Linnaeus’s sexual descriptions and coined new botanical terms to translate these discoveries from Latin (most importantly stamen and pistil—made out to be the vegetal equivalent of penis and vagina). He called Linnaeus’s system “unexplored poetic ground. It affords fine scope for poetic landscape.”¹² Beyond a recognition that plant sexuality lends itself to poetry, I take this to be an acknowledgment of the particularly generative creativity of plant sexuality in the realm of poetic language and the way it (i.e., this language and by extension plants) has been shaping culture in a phytopoetic way. In other words, the historical view shows us how plant behavior repeatedly challenges and changes human thinking and imagining around the norms governing gender and sexuality, which results in the creative production of literary texts and abundant poetic language that experiment with these new ideas. In her article “Botany for Gentlemen,” Janet Browne describes what I would therefore call a phytopoetic multiplication effect of plant sexuality:

Beyond shaping conceptions of gender (not just regarding women, as we will see in the next section), I would add to Browne’s list that plant behavior also molded ideas about human sexuality.¹⁴ As the knowledge of plant sexuality circulated through scientific discoveries and poetic language, it shaped cultural discourses and artworks.

Crimes against Nature: In Pursuit of “Prostitutes” and “Pansies”

In the early nineteenth century, the fear of possible moral corruption from the study of nature ebbed for a while. Romanticism and the Victorian language of flowers returned to flowers as symbols—of longing, as in Novalis’s fantastical Blue Flower for the romantics, and of the desires of courtship and love that the flower language seemed to promise.¹⁵ Interspersed by depictions of women as flowers, such as those in in J. J. Grandville’s Les Fleurs Animées (The Flowers Personified, 1847), these metaphorical notions returned to a familiar repertoire that certainly persisted alongside the more erotic depictions all along. Yet toward the end of the nineteenth century, scientific developments that revolved around Charles Darwin’s work once again prompted an engagement with plants as explicitly sexual beings, and literature reacted with satire—though this time with different sociopolitical targets. Instead of debating whether botany was an appropriate pursuit for women, a wider range of sexual behaviors now took center stage, and the discussion expanded to include a variety of sciences, such as sexology, biology, and genetics.

Against the backdrop of attempts to keep Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution out of schools, modernist authors revisited the anxiety over plant sexuality in texts around 1900, and they satirized a returning fear of the morally corrupting power of botany. In Hanns Heinz Ewers short story Die Petition (The Petition, 1904), for instance, a Bavarian priest (who resembles the upset clergyman Polwhele) declares botany a “danger to morality”¹⁶—this time for school children instead of women:

The story is satirizing curricular censorship that resulted in a ban of biology instruction in German secondary schools from 1882 to 1908.¹⁸ In the so-called Cultural Struggle (Kulturkampf) regarding the influence of the Catholic Church on education and politics, both Darwinian evolution and plant sexuality were considered morally corrosive. Just like its literary predecessors, the text picks up on the scandalous nature of the Linnean discoveries: Ewers’s priest goes through the Linnean categories one by one and chronicles his continuously mounting dismay. He also returns to the familiar metaphor of describing plant reproduction as sex work:

Flowers feature no longer as chaste virgins—instead, they engage in a promiscuous interspecies exchange of sexual favors and goods. Even their ability to self-fertilize is mentioned elsewhere in the paragraph. No wonder that questions about sexual orientation and gender identity will also arise at this time, as discourses about human sexuality began proliferating in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

With the discovery of the role of pollen, male sexuality had initially entered the equation of plant sexuality in a distinctly heterosexual manner (focused on reproduction and depicted as marriages between opposite sexes), yet the realm of flowers and nature writ large continued to be shrouded in predominantly female symbolism. This changed in the late nineteenth century with the emergence of the discipline of sexology, spearheaded by predominantly British and German-language scholars like Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Sigmund Freud, who drew on ideas from biology, medicine, psychology, and sociology but also criminology to study human sexuality. Foucault has famously located “the birth of the homosexual” in this time period, and as terminology such as hetero- and homosexuality became widespread around 1900, plants became once again potent metaphors for encoded talk about sex.²⁰ With Mary Wollstonecraft’s criticism of the depiction of women as beautiful flowers in mind, the opening scene of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) is indicative of a metaphorical shift. This novel about male beauty and friendship begins with a garden scene full of flowers: “Lord Henry went out to the garden and found Dorian Gray burying his face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their perfume as if it had been wine. He came close to him and put his hand upon his shoulder.”²¹ The encounter between the two men in the garden is suggestive, and homoerotic passages in the text were initially censored. The overwhelming sensual excess of flowers that appears repeatedly throughout the novel fits Dorian’s deliberations about beauty, while the longstanding association of the floral with the female seems to render effeminate what is conceived of as love or now male sexuality in this context.²² With the example of “pansies,” Caspar Heinemann has shown that the association of flowers and men is often connected to same-sex desire.²³

In the context of the time around 1900, discussions about the wide range of sexual behaviors in plants therefore also constituted cultural and political criticism about the suppression of other sexual orientations and gender identities. Written only four years before Oscar Wilde’s infamous trial for “gross indecency,” which had Petition author and lawyer Ewers speak up on Wilde’s behalf, Oskar Panizza’s short story “Das Verbrechen in Tavistock-Square” (“The Crime in Tavistock-Square,” 1891) presents such social criticism about same-sex desire with the help of plants. The text presents the criminal case of masturbating plants. A young policeman with a “girly”²⁴ voice reports the following discovery to his chief:

This act of plant sex that falsely translates the reproductive dropping of seed into autoeroticism seems to return us to the one-sex model, but the story contains no women. Instead, the policeman likens his observation to “movements like . . . policemen often make them on their cots at night,”²⁶ insinuating not only that his (all-male) colleagues are masturbating but also that they are implicated in the crime at hand. At the time, same-sex attraction was often understood to be a consequence of masturbation, and both behaviors were considered amoral, while homosexuality was also legally persecuted. Roses here no longer signify virginal women—instead they suggest a sexual encounter between men in a public park.

The young policeman calls the vegetal behavior a “crime against nature,” which is a legal term that has been applied to a range of sexual acts throughout history, including same-sex relationships.²⁷ The underlying idea of unnatural behavior is evoked in debates over sexual orientation and gender identities to this day, for instance by chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court Roy S. Moore, who insisted on calling same-sex attraction “a crime against nature” in the early 2000s.²⁸ Over a century earlier, the deeply religious police chief in Panizza’s story is also promoted to the role of chief justice because he responds resolutely to such a “crime.” He sends the young policeman to an asylum and demands the death penalty for the plants:

Even though there were no plants on the arc because they survived the biblical deluge on their own (an olive branch signaled that humans and animals could safely return), the chief is convinced that they can and must be destroyed in this manner. Of course, the fulfillment of his prayer would end all life on earth, since plants provide the atmosphere in which we breathe. Despite realizing this, the priest in Ewers’s Petition recommends the same approach, at least at some point in the future: “The best would be to eradicate all plants on the entire earth, to destroy these lusting, incestuous, perverse creatures root and branch.”³⁰ Turning from plants to the political subtext of the stories for a moment, the law certainly attempted to respond to this request with the persecution of gay men and other queer people at the time. Ultimately, both narratives show how plants change the human imagination about vegetal behaviors and, with it, ideas about human sexuality. Plants go from “the chastest flowers,” the roses that represent virginal women, to “lusting” beings of all sexes that promiscuously involve anyone in their pursuits and make room for same-sex desire. They also predict the next step: “incestuous creatures” that can reproduce with themselves and create endless queer possibilities.

Phallophytes and Fern Fathers: Asexual Reproduction and the Collective

As the increasingly more nuanced understanding of plant sexuality phytopoetically shaped discourses about female and male sexuality from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, the definition of sexuality kept expanding. This is perhaps most apparent when it comes to asexual reproduction. While humans need medical help for such an endeavor, lots of plants can reproduce through clones. Many plant parts can be replanted to grow into a new plant, too, and plant parts can be grafted onto other vegetal organisms and thrive. Asexual reproduction leads to less genetic diversity because it involves only one parent (circumventing the need for binary sexes), which is why lots of plants can reproduce both sexually through pollination and asexually (and many take turns doing so in what is called “alternation of generations”). Asexual reproduction (particularly that of fungi) has become popular in contemporary discussions around queer sexualities, and it appears phytopoetically on the heels of the previous texts, for instance in Alfred Döblin’s Berge Meere und Giganten (Mountains Oceans Giants, 1924), a voluminous science fiction novel that pits unrequited human desire for plants against asexual plant reproduction. As T. S. Miller has shown, science fiction seems to hold particular potential for depicting humans and plants desiring each other—something not fully spelled out in the literary examples of plant sexuality so far.³¹ Not only does the genre’s engagement with the natural sciences provide botanical knowledge, but the fictional worlds of outer space and future times also enable humans and plants to act according to different rules—scenarios that are at once tantalizing and threatening in the historical real-world context of Döblin’s novel, in which sexuality is biopolitically regulated by means of criminalization. On its tour de force through future centuries on earth, Mountains Oceans Giants also bends poetic rules by experimenting with language, listing words in sequences without commas, like in its title, so that sentences come to have multiple verbs and other ungrammatical yet expressive strategies that make for a distinct style.

Book seven of the novel tells the story of an invisible energy that draws the bodies of all species toward each other as if with magnetic power, including humans and plants. The mysterious attraction began because humans interfered with nature while fighting overpopulation and other familiar specters of the Anthropocene, and it will become an uncontrollable force of destruction that incorporates all living matter. The scene of human attraction to plants takes place on a fleet of ships rendered immobile by “a thick plant mat,” which is described with anthropomorphic allegories such as “swelling shrubs thick as arms, branching boisterously, with inch-long sharp-toothed leaves; growing berries the size of apples that serve them as swim bladders; like heads they raised them.”³² As people try to rid the ships of plants, they become increasingly more fatigued by the plant-induced effects, like “opium smokers.”³³ Losing control in the face of the vegetal attempt of incorporating all matter into itself, humans begin to react to the plants’ desire with a libidinous response of their own: “A violent soon impregnable loving sensation ran through them. The men trembled in the frost of arousal, the women shook themselves, walked quivering slowly. Every limb on them was charged with lust, every movement brought them closer to the erupting delirium.”³⁴ The figures are gripped with a forceful desire that other humans cannot satisfy, even though they try, as the next sentence indicates: “They entwined each other, and when they had intermingled their bodies and let go of each other, they were dissatisfied.”³⁵ They even attempt to satisfy themselves with the help of ship parts, which renders the description of humans increasingly more mechanistic—equating human and ship matter: “They kissed and embraced ropes, rubbed and hit arms and legs, the torso [Rumpf, also means hull] on steps.”³⁶ But none of these acts brings satisfaction because their boundless desire is for the phallically described plants: “Above board protruded the powerful shafts of algae; them they pulled closer, to them they felt desire.”³⁷ As plants have pulled the ship into their embrace, humans seem to be infected by an uncontrollable desire to pull them close, too. At the same time, their lust is tinged by fear and unrest: “The blissful whimpering, the clueless groaning, fearful moaning of the not-to-be-calmed.”³⁸ The violent undertones quickly take over and no satisfaction is reached. The plants rip the ships apart, and the force seems to merge everything in its wake. Plants, animals, humans—both organic and inorganic matter melds into a mobile mass that devours everything it touches and soon covers sea and soil.

The scene sets up a shift from an anthropocentric conception of sexuality toward a vegetal one in which human desires are not dominant, and it is significant that the plants in question are algae. Algae, mosses, lichen, and ferns belong to the Linnean group of cryptogamae, which reproduce asexually, through spores or in many other ways—some of which can seem violent to human conceptions of individuality because they involve tearing off pieces of the parent plant. The children of asexually reproducing plants are clones of their parent, which disrupts human ideas about binary sex requirements for reproduction. The text describes the reproduction of cryptogamic land plants: “The giant ferns . . . stood like inexhaustible mothers and fathers and conceived. . . . These plants gave birth to living offspring; the seedling developed already on the backside of the strong leaves; its sprouts hung in threads down from the leaves.”³⁹ In a mix of asexual reproduction and gendered human metaphors of birth and parenthood, fern fathers can conceive like mothers, and both give live birth. Yet this beginning of life seems inextricably tied to death, as the text goes on to describe: “The incessant crashing down of trunks. They broke down, often complete with leaves and animal load and swelled across the ground. Some of them were unable to fall; corpses stood right and left; more powerful beings devoured them.”⁴⁰ The novel makes it seem as if asexual reproduction might hold the possibility of the individual’s violent end to sustain more powerful others: cloning requires giving up a piece of oneself and loosing individuality. Another example on these pages pairs reproductive vocabulary about yolk sacks and umbilical cords with violence and contextualizes the process further: “Often, bushes threateningly lashed out at each other each like arms, seemed to want to suffocate each other. Then, their branches broke upon touch; they melted into one; together their nutrients flooded into all; a big being rose up.”⁴¹ The one “big being” carries the nutrients but also the genetic information of the many plants that it devoured. The beginning and end of life go hand in hand in these scenes that present a vigorous striving toward the survival of the species rather than the reproduction of the individual. Without keeping kinds of reproduction and individuals neatly separated, these moments in Döblin’s monist novel draw attention to the fact that plant sexuality is a collective affair. A plant can be both, it can be many, and it can be plural, which frequently muddles ideas about sex—and accordingly extrapolations about human gender, sexuality, and even individuality. Plants reproduce in many ways, with or without an Other—creating a wide variety of sexual possibilities that fall into what Catriona Sandilands and others have described as queer ecologies.⁴²

The mix of asexual and sexual reproduction in plants recasts human sexuality as a range of options. In the novel, one of these might even entail the vegetal fulfillment of human desire: In book eight, people figure out a way to build defense towers out of biomass to protect themselves from the approaching tidal wave of voracious matter. Called giants, these towers include animals, plants, and humans—and just like the violent merging in the reproductive scenes before, they become one: “The testicles of the men merged with treetops and blossoms; they poured their juice into the round bodies that they carried like berries. Under the overabundance of the juices, one frequently saw the giants bend, moan and spill their seed.”⁴³ The plant-human giants spill their seed—as if the young policeman’s discovery of masturbating plants had become reimagined in this later novel. A return to sexual reproduction is indicated by the seeds, berries, and blossoms. Juices are cast both as semen and nutrients in these scenes—a sort of lifeblood of these new admixed creatures for whom reproduction of all possible kinds is a fight for joint survival. If they submit, humans can be incorporated in this collective.

Desiring Plants: Hugging Trees and Smelling Flowers

Perhaps Döblin’s text strikes us as a strange, with its combination of reproduction (a concept that is still coded in strongly heterosexual terms despite the possibilities demonstrated in the text) and violence (an idea often pushed toward the fringes of sexual fetishism). Yet it raises the question of sexual encounters of humans with plants beyond the imagination. Some contemporary performance art projects create space for human-plant sexual encounters, even in ways that call up ideas from Döblin’s text. In his project Pteridophilia (2016–), for instance, artist Zheng Bo chose ferns for their asexual reproduction and created queer sexual encounters that involve BDSM practices.⁴⁴ More broadly speaking, sexual desire for plants, such as dendrophilia, is often subsumed under the label ecosex and is perhaps most prominently described by Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens in their 2011 “Ecosex Manifesto”: “The Earth is our lover. . . . We shamelessly hug trees, massage the earth with our feet, and talk erotically to plants. We are very dirty. . . . We are polymorphous and pollen-amorous . . . all sex is ecosex.”⁴⁵ The pair of California artists and academics act out the manifesto in public performances, records of which can be accessed on their website, and they invite others to do so on ecosex walking tours and at other events. While these examples often seem to prioritize human desire over plant sexuality (even if they have an environmental thrust that often additionally entails a post- or decolonial critique), there are also art projects, such as the Plant Sex Consultancy, that focus on enhancing plant sexuality on its own terms, without bothering with human pleasure.⁴⁶ Perhaps striking the difficult balance between human and plant sexuality successfully, artist Ani Liu bioengineered a lipstick that will make a plant bloom upon being kissed in her project Botany of Desire (not to be confused with Michael Pollan’s book by the same name).⁴⁷

The kiss returns us to the act of smelling flowers with which this text began—and to a contemporary literary example to conclude this phytopoetic history. Contemporary poet and avid gardener Ross Gay illustrates a smelling-turned-kissing encounter with a lily in his Book of Delights (2019)—a set of short prose vignettes that narrate everyday delights:

The kissing and “pushing my face in[to]” this pink flower is a phytopoetic description of an intimate erotic encounter that evokes cunnilingus. Delight, or the pleasure of la petit mort, the sensation after orgasm that is likened to death, will resurrect the worshiper to a new life, after experiencing annihilation and rebirth (as if the priest’s and police chief’s prayers for a deluge had been answered by Döblin’s wave of lethally fertile matter). Mingling sex with the sacred, pollen anoints the kneeling human figure in the act of fertilization. Marked by golden plant semen, “your face and fingers” will retain the smell “of where they’ve been” for the rest of the day, as if becoming part of the vegetal collective. The text turns not only from cunnilingus to semen but also from the voice of an “I” to “you,” signaling the common and perhaps deindividualized nature of this sexual human-plant encounter, while the lily’s pronoun remains “it”—doing away with gendered language that points to specific sexes. In traditional iconography, a lily would represent Mary, which fits the prayer. But this lily has been deflowered, and rather than representing blushing virginal coyness, it has acquired the divine power to “resurrect you.” While this “end[ed] the life you had previously led” and changed the self (potentially including “your” sexuality) in fundamental ways, the lily will simply welcome the next pollinators. And even if nobody were to kiss it, the lily would simply reproduce asexually—because it can do so, too, and in several ways to boot. In the trajectory of this phytopoetic history of plants and sexuality, the lily is as far removed from vegetal visions of virtuous, virginal women-plants and their corruption by pollen and “plant prostitutes” as it is from concerns about “crimes against nature” and the persecution of male same-sex desire; rather, it signals the myriad options of queer reproduction as part of a natural collective and grants erotic delight.

Notes

References