300 i Flora Unveiled
The sexualized tree- grafting ritual suggests a folk tradition that could be quite ancient,
perhaps extending back to the tree goddesses of the Bronze and Iron Ages. According to
Wahshiyya, if the girl becomes pregnant, the branch “will possess all of the tree’s odor and
taste.” He cites as an example the grafting of a pear branch onto a lemon tree. However,
he warns that for the pears to receive the color and odor of the lemon, the girl must not be
forced against her will. To avoid rape, the farmer is advised to “do this with his wife whom
he has married that particular year, not otherwise.”
The preceding procedure was recommended for the transfer of color and odor from
the stock to the scion. If, in addition, the farmer wished the fruit of the grafted branch to
acquire the taste of the scion’s fruit, stronger measures were needed. For example, if one
wanted to graft an apple branch onto a pomegranate tree so that the apples tasted as sweet
as pomegranates:
[H] e must bring a girl to the tree where he wants to graft it and he must speak pleasant-
ries with her until she laughs, he shall kiss her and pinch her and give her the branch
so that she will graft it by her own hand. When she puts the branch in its place, he
must remove her clothes from behind. While she is facing the tree and grafting the
branch, he must have intercourse with her from behind and he must order her to take
her time in completing the grafting— which means the planting of the branch— until
he ejaculates. He should try to take care that the ejaculation and the completion of
the graft should coincide.^33If the girl becomes pregnant, according to Wahshiyya, the grafted apple branch “will bear
sweet and juicy apples.”
Medieval Europeans first learned of the Nabatean grafting rituals (which may have been
apocryphal) through the twelfth- century Jewish scholar Maimonides, who, in his Guide
for the Perplexed, described them as “remarkable witchcraft” involving “disgraceful sex.”
Throughout the Middle Ages, a whiff of indecency clung to the practice of grafting fruit
trees, the majority of which were apples. Typically, a newly emerged “lance” of first- year
wood from a sweet apple tree was used as the scion to be grafted onto a wild apple (or “cra-
bapple”) stock, usually by the technique of cleft- grafting. The sixteenth- century French bota-
nist Jean Ruel, to whose ideas about the sexuality of flowers we will return at the end of the
chapter, had characterized typical grafting between species as “miscella insitione ... insitione
adulteries” (“mixed insertions ... adulterous insertions”).^34 Since sweet apples were normally
propagated by grafting onto wild species, this may further account for the apple’s association
with adultery.
Indeed, the belief that grafting was the equivalent of plant sex persisted well into the
seventeenth century, since no less an authority than the Renaissance scholar Francis Bacon
(not to be confused with Roger Bacon, his distant relation from the Middle Ages)^35 felt
the need to refute the notion. In his book, Sylva Sylvarum (1627), Bacon cites the ancient
Greek idea that new animal species arise when “there is copulation of several kinds; and
so compound creatures, as the mule, that is generated betwixt the horse and the ass” are
produced. But, he adds, “The compounding or mixture of kinds in plants is not found out.”