The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (9 page)

Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices—visual, olfactory, and tactile—to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals. In order to achieve their objectives, many flowers rely not just on simple chemical signals but on signs, sometimes even on a kind of symbolism. Some plant species go so far as to impersonate other creatures or things in order to secure pollination or, in the case of carnivorous plants, a meal. To entice flies into its inner sanctum (there to be digested by waiting enzymes), the pitcher plant has developed a weirdly striated maroon-and-white flower that is not at all attractive unless you happen to be attracted to decaying meat. (The flower’s rancid scent reinforces this effect.)

Ophryus orchids look uncannily like insects, of all things—like bees or flies, depending on the orchid species in question. The Victorians believed this mimicry was intended to scare away insects so the flower could, chastely, pollinate itself. What the Victorians failed to consider was that the Ophryus might resemble an insect precisely in order to attract insects to it. The flower has evolved exactly the right pattern of curves and spots and hairiness to convince certain male insects that it is a female as viewed, tantalizingly, from behind. Botanists call the resultant behavior on the part of the male insect “pseudocopulation”; they call the flower that inspires this behavior the “prostitute orchid.” In his frenzy of attempted intercourse, the insect ensures the orchid’s pollination. That’s because the insect’s rising frustration compels him to rush around mounting one blossom after another, effectively disseminating the flower’s genes, if not his own.

This stands for that:
flowers by their very nature traffic in a kind of metaphor, so that even a meadow of wildflowers brims with meanings not of our making. Move into the garden, however, and the meanings only multiply as the flowers take aim not only at the bee’s or the bat’s or the butterfly’s obscure notions of the good or the beautiful, but at ours as well. Sometime long ago the flower’s gift for metaphor crossed with our own, and the offspring of that match, that miraculous symbiosis of desire, are the flowers of the garden.

• • •

In my garden right now it is high summer, the middle of July, and the place is so crowded with flowers, is so busy and multifarious, that it feels more like a city street than a quiet corner of the countryside. At first the scene presents only a daunting confusion of sensory information, a bustle of floral color and scent set to a soundtrack of buzzing insects and rustling leaves, but after a while the individual flowers begin to come into focus. They’re the garden’s dramatis personae, each of them taking a brief turn on the summer stage, during which it tries its level best to catch our eye. Did I say
our
eye? Well, not
only
ours—for there’s also that other audience, the bees and butterflies, moths and wasps and hummingbirds and all the other potential pollinators.

By now the old roses have mostly finished, leaving behind tired shrubs wadded with sad bits of old tissue, but the rugosas and teas are still pumping out color, attracting attention. Tangled up in their petals and seemingly inebriated, the Japanese beetles are dining and humping intently, sometimes three and four of them going at it at once; it’s a very Roman scene, and it leaves the blossoms trashed. Farther down the garden path the daylilies lean forward expectantly, like dogs; tiny wasps accept the invitation to climb way up into their throats in search of nectar; afterward the bugs come stumbling out like drunks from a bar. Before they hit the open air, though, they jostle the lily’s dainty scoop of stamens, chalking themselves with pollen they’ll later dust off on the pistils of some other blossom.
*

At the front of the perennial bed the lamb’s ears form a low, soft, gray forest of flower spikes that look as though they’ve been dipped into a vat of bees: the spikes are completely coated, more wing now than petal, and the whole flower is vibrating with the attention. Behind them and high above, the plume poppies throw clouds of tiny white flowers, intricately hairy up close and irresistible to honeybees, who look to be swimming in the air in and among them. The sweet peas extend themselves seductively on slender stems, but a bee can’t gain admittance to their flowers without first prying open their pursed lips; this coy bit of architecture leaves the (erroneous) impression that it is the bee’s desire being gratified here, not the pea’s.

The bees! The bees will let themselves be lured into the most ridiculous positions, avidly nosing their way like pigs through the thick purple brush of a thistle, rolling around helplessly in a single peony’s blond Medusa thatch of stamens—they remind me of Odysseus’s crew in thrall to Circe. To my eye the bees appear lost in transports of sexual ecstasy, but of course that’s only a projection. It’s only a coincidence—
isn’t it?
—that this passionate flower-bee embrace that made people think about sex for a thousand years before pollination was understood really
is
about sex. “Flying penises” is what one botanist called bees. But with the rare exception of a flower like the prostitute orchid, for the insects at least it’s really not about the sex; to the extent they’re penises, they’re unwitting penises. Still, the bees certainly do seem besides themselves, and they may well be, but probably on account of the sugary nectars, or maybe one of the designer drugs flowers sometimes deploy in order to drive bees to distraction. Or, who knows, maybe they’re just lost in their work.

I’ve fixed on the bee’s-eye view of this scene, but of course the flower’s perspective would disclose that in the garden human desire looms just as large. In fact, the place is crowded with species that have evolved expressly to catch
my
eye, often to the detriment of getting themselves pollinated. I’m thinking of all the species that have sacrificed their scent in the interest of grander or doubled or improbably colored blooms, ideals of beauty that probably go unappreciated in the kingdom of the pollinators, a place where the eye is not always sovereign.

For many flowers the great love of their lives now is humankind. Those daylilies leaning expectantly forward? Their faces are in fact turned toward us, whose favor now ensures their success better than any bug’s can. That peony with the salacious pubic stamens? Blame the Chinese for that one: for thousands of years their poets, discerning manifestations of yin and yang in the garden, likened peony blossoms to a woman’s sexual organs (and the bee or butterfly to a man’s); over time Chinese peonies evolved, by means of artificial selection, to gratify that conceit. Even the perfume of certain Chinese tree peonies is womanly, a scent of flowers tinged with briny sweat; the flowers smell less like perfume out of the bottle than a scent that’s spent time on human skin. It may still attract the bees, but by now it’s our brain stems the scent is meant to fire.

• • •

Making my way through this lit-up landscape, I try to pin down exactly what distinguishes the garden in bloom from an ordinary patch of nature. For starters, the flowering garden is a place you immediately sense is thick with information, thick as a metropolis, in fact. It’s an oddly sociable, public sort of place, in which species seem eager to give one another the time of day; they dress up, flirt, flit, visit. By comparison, the surrounding forests and fields are much sleepier boroughs, steadily humming monotonies of green, in which many of the flowers are inconspicuous or short-lived and many of the plants seem to be keeping to their own kind, declining to enlist other species, minding their own business. That business is chiefly photosynthesis, of course, nature’s routine factory work; sexual reproduction is going on here too, but with little to show for it: Who ever notices when the conifers release their pollen on the wind, the ferns their minute spores? April through October, every day looks pretty much the same around here. What beauty there is is in large part inadvertent, purposeless, and unadvertised.

Come into the garden, or even the flowering meadow, and the landscape immediately quickens. Hey, what’s going on here today?
Something,
senses even the dimmest bee or boy, something special. Call that something the stirrings of beauty. Beauty in nature often shows up in the vicinity of sex—think of the plumage of birds or mating rituals throughout the animal kingdom. “Sexual selection”—that is, evolution’s favoring of features that increase a plant’s or animal’s attractiveness and therefore its reproductive success—is the best explanation we have for the otherwise senseless extravagance of feathers and flowers, maybe also sports cars and bikinis. In nature, at least, the expense of beauty is usually paid for by sex.

There may or may not be a correlation between the beautiful and the good, but there probably is one between beauty and health. (Which, I suppose, in Darwinian terms,
is
the good.) Evolutionary biologists believe that in many creatures beauty is a reliable indicator of health, and therefore a perfectly sensible way to choose one mate over another. Gorgeous plumage, lustrous hair, symmetrical features are “certificates of health,” as one scientist puts it, advertisements that a creature carries genes for resistance to parasites
*
and is not otherwise under stress. A fabulous tail is a metabolic extravagance only the healthy can afford. (In the same way, a fabulous car is a financial extravagance only the successful can afford.) In our own species, too, ideals of beauty often correlate with health: when lack of food was what usually killed people, people judged body fat to be a thing of beauty. (Though the current preference for sickly-pale, rail-thin models suggests that culture can override evolutionary imperatives.)

But what about plants, who don’t get to choose their mates? Why should the bees, who do the choosing for them, care a fig about plant health? They don’t, yet unwittingly they reward it. It’s the healthiest flowers that can afford the most extravagant display and sweetest nectar, thereby ensuring the most visits from bees—and therefore the most sex and most offspring. So in a sense, the flowers do choose their mates on the basis of health, using the bees as their proxies.

• • •

Before the advent of this arms race of sexual selection—before flowers, before feathers—all nature was the factory. There was beauty there, but it was not beauty by design; what beauty there was was, like that of forests or mountains, strictly in the eye of the beholder.

If you wanted to invent a new myth of the origin of beauty (or at least designed beauty), you could do worse than begin here in the garden, among the flowers. Begin with the petal, where beauty’s first principle—contrast with its surroundings—appears, a feat here accomplished with color. The eye, lulled by the all-around green all around, registers the difference and rouses. Bees, once thought to be color-blind, do in fact see color, though they see it differently than we do. Green appears gray, a background hue against which red—which bees perceive as black—stands out most sharply. (Bees can also see at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, where we’re blind; a garden in this light must look like a big-city airport at night, lit up and color-coded to direct circling bees to landing zones of nectar and pollen.)

Bee or boy, our attention is awakened by a petal’s color, alerting us to what comes next, which is form or pattern, beauty’s second inflection of the given world. Against the background of inchoate green a contrasting color by itself could well be an accident of some kind (a feather, say, or a dying leaf), but the appearance of symmetry is a reliable expression of formal organization—of purpose, even intent. Symmetry is an unmistakable sign that there’s relevant information in a place. That’s because symmetry is a property shared by a relatively small number of things in the landscape, all of them of keen interest to us. The shortlist of nature’s symmetricals includes other creatures, other people (most notably the faces of other people), human artifacts, and plants—but especially flowers. Symmetry is also a sign of health in a creature, since mutations and environmental stresses can easily disturb it. So paying attention to symmetrical things makes good sense: symmetry is usually significant.

The same holds true for bees. How do we know? Because symmetry in a plant is an extravagance (whereas animals who want to move in a straight line can’t do without it), and natural selection probably wouldn’t go to the trouble if the bees didn’t reward the effort. “The colors and shapes of the flowers are a precise record of what bees find attractive,” the poet and critic Frederick Turner has written. He goes on to suggest that it “would be a paradoxically anthropocentric mistake to assume that, because bees are more primitive organisms . . . there is nothing in common between our pleasure in flowers and theirs.”

But if the pleasure bees and people take in flowers have a common root, standards of floral beauty soon begin to specialize and diverge—and not just bee from boy, but bee from bee as well. For it seems that different kinds of bees are attracted to different kinds of symmetry. Honeybees favor the radial symmetry of daisies and clover and sunflowers, while bumblebees prefer the bilateral symmetry of orchids, peas, and foxgloves.
*

Through their colors and symmetries, through these most elemental principles of beauty (that is, contrast and pattern), flowers alert other species to their presence and significance. Walk among them, and you see faces turned toward you (though not only you), beckoning, greeting, informing, promising—
meaning.
Beyond that, matters begin to get complicated, the honeybees developing their own canons of beauty, the bumblebees theirs. And then into this great dance of plants and pollinators step us, compounding the meanings of flowers beyond all reason, turning their sexual organs into tropes of our own (and of so much else), drawing and driving the evolution of flowers toward the extraordinary, freakish, and precarious beauty of a Madame Hardy rose or a Semper Augustus tulip.