Uncommon Fruits

A little less than 500 million years ago—that is, around 3 billion years after cyanobacteria, the plants’ predecessors, evolved—plants started to colonize the Earth’s land. Mosses, hornworts, and liverworts dominated the terrestrial landscape: they stayed close to the ground, clung to every drop of water they could find, and absorbed it through all parts of their little bodies. It didn’t take long, though, for plants to start developing vascular systems. This creative move, well thought through over millions of years, helped them stand upright, reach toward the sun, and gather more energy while simultaneously transporting water, which remained in the depths of soil, to the upper parts of the plant. But they were left immobile, clinging to the earth. Their project would not be accomplished if they would not produce novel technology that would provide them with means of moving and settling the land: seeds. But it was another invention—secretive, enigmatic—that led Charles Darwin, father of the theory of evolution, to use the evocative phrase “abominable mystery”: the mystery of the flower. “The rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery... [Gaston de] Saporta believes that there was an astonishingly rapid development of the high plants, as soon [as] flower-frequenting insects were developed and favoured intercrossing... I sh'd like to see this whole problem solved.,” Darwin wrote. How did flowers come into being? Was it truly the sudden diversification of insects at that specific moment in history that sparked coevolution?
Whatever the case, flowers possess a unique power—an invitation to coevolve. They also became, for human beings, emblems of love and beauty. In his influential text The Language of Flowers, Georges Bataille wrote: “Men have linked the brilliance of flowers to their amorous emotions because, on either side, it is a question of phenomena that precede fertilization. [...] It is interesting to observe, however, that if one says that flowers are beautiful, it is because they seem to conform to what must be, in other words they represent, as flowers, the human ideal. [...] [E]ven more than by the filth of its organs, the flower is betrayed by the fragility of its corolla: thus, far from answering the demands of human ideas, it is the sign of their failure. In fact, after a very short period of glory the marvelous corolla rots indecently in the sun, thus becoming, for the plant, a garish withering. Risen from the stench of the manure pile—even though it seemed for a moment to have escaped it in a flight of angelic and lyrical purity—the flower seems to relapse abruptly into its original squalor: the most ideal is rapidly reduced to a wisp of aerial manure. For flowers do not age honestly like leaves, which lose nothing of their beauty, even after they have died; flowers wither like old and overly made-up dowagers, and they die ridiculously on stems that seemed to carry them to the clouds. It is impossible to exaggerate the tragicomic oppositions indicated in the course of this death-drama, endlessly played out between earth and sky, and it is evident that one can only paraphrase this laughable duel by introducing, not as a sentence, but more precisely as an ink stain, this nauseating banality: love smells like death.”¹

“[T]he first treatise on sexuality of plants [De Sexu Plantarum Epistola by the German botanist and doctor Rudolf Jakob Camerarius] was published only in the late 17th century. A real breakthrough, however, occurred with the sexual system of plant classification presented half a century later by Carl Linnaeus, so it was only modern botany that developed knowledge about the sexual life of plants, even though in its early period it became embroiled in erroneous analogies between plant sexuality and the normative sexuality of humans, as it was understood at the time. Contemporary studies of plants don’t look at plant lives for analogies with the human condition, but rather as inspiration for rethinking the way plants function in nature cultures. Both botanical sex and the diversity of plant forms can stimulate human fantasies and inspire non-normative sexual practices. [...] The Swedish botanist [Carl Linnaeus] proposed the so called Systema Sexuale (“sexual system”), classiying plants according to the structure of their flowers, or more precisely, the number of their stamens and carpels. As botany developed, there emerged the uncomfortable truth that flowers can be not only male or female but also hermaphroditic. From the very beginning, a classification based on sexual organs proved highly controversial among naturalists, and Linnaeus, not daring to propose a third sex–something that the flowers would suggest–insisted on heterosexual allegories, using matrimonial terminology, e.g. in the description of hermaphroditic flowers. In his writings, the petals were referred to as the conjugal bed; the stamens as husbands, bridegrooms, and escorts; and the carpels as wives, virgins, concubines, or brides. But that didn’t solve the problem because bisexual flowers, such as anthurium, contain one female organ and multiple male ones, “residing in the same bed.” So not just correct identification but, above all, the acceptance of the sexual distinctness and complexity of flowers created within botany the possibility of moving beyond ideologically charged norms based on the heterosexual model. [...] With their sexuality, plant bodies open the possibility of unthought fantasies and unknown practices, for sexuality, including human sexuality, is never determined; it is ‘contained in the next sexual encounter, rather than in the synthesis of all one’s past sexual activities.’”

“Smell and taste differentiate, whereas language, like sight and hearing, integrates. The first mouth stockpiles, the second expends: words pile up in dictionaries, food accumulates, frozen, in coldrooms, like bank accounts; smells and tastes are transitory, evanescent, ephemeral. Differential. The map is refined like delicate silk, or a spider's web. With neither stock nor total, a fragment of time.”