Readings in Wood by Leland John;

Author:Leland, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

SEX

The discovery that flowers are sex organs titillated the world. Darwin’s grandfather wrote an entire book of poems on floral promiscuity. Botanists, then nearly all male, decided, like adolescent boys possessed of their fathers’ girlie mags, to organize the world by sexual organ. They still do, which leaves those of us unwilling to practice gynecology upon a daffodil to take their word on such matters.

And learn the names for a perfect flower’s perfect parts: the slightly salacious stalk or peduncle (my friend Gordon’s nickname for his peduncular penis), above which spread the sepal’s green gown and petal’s colored petticoats, in whose sweet-scented center rise male and female parts, our gardens the haunt, dear Darwin, of hermaphrodites. The coy female parts, gynoecium (“woman’s house”), curve most femininely in the sketches I have peeked at and contain one or, miracle du Diable, more than one carpel, the holy grail of pollen grain. At the carpel’s bottom sits the ovary, whose placenta-hiding walls describe as near perfect an arc as did those of her I hiked behind ascending North Carolina’s Big Butt Mountain. From this rises a skinny-waisted style, the floral equivalent of the vaginal canal. Atop which rests the stigma, whose pollen-poaching parts are as various as the flowers they adorn, from the feathered finery of wind-pollinated grasses and trees to the sculpture-garden grotesques visited by various animals. (In Greek, stigma means mark or point, and its use for the floral door of delights should not be taken as stigmatizing those who spread petal to wind or bee or bird.) You may know carpels as pistils; certainly I did before the Internet informed me that I was several decades dehors courant. Which is as well, pistil coming to us from Latin pistillum, pestle, from what excited botanists thought the female organ resembled, unaware as to the proper roles of mortar and pestle in sexual metaphors.

Whirling round most single pistils, ahem, carpels, attends a crowd of stamens, collectively called the androecium (“man’s house”). Each of these stamina (who knew before this, the plural of stamen, Latin for “thread”) contains a thread-like filament, atop which rides the anther, where reside pollen, the business end of the androecium. Not being a scientist by trade, I note in passing that the Mexican Lacandonia schismatica reverses this all-too-familiar-to-human-males arrangement of more males than females. L. schismatica’s three or four studly stamina standing surrounded by a bevy of, count them, sixty to eighty pistils cocked and ready for action.

A small magnifying lens makes much of this world visible. And should voyeur you not spy all the parts, despair not. I did say we were ogling a perfect flower’s perfect parts. Some flowers, alas, like us, are less than perfect. Perfect flowers are hermaphrodite, imperfect flowers, like most of us merely male or female, with the other sex’s bits and pieces vestigial. In addition, some plants carry flowers of both sexes and are monoecious (Greek for “one house”). Others separate the sexes tree by tree and are dioecious (Greek for “two houses”).

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