380 i Flora Unveiled
notorious Edmund Curll.^1 Curll is best remembered as the publisher of numerous satirical
books and pamphlets of an openly sexual nature.
The Enlightenment period could also aptly be called the Age of Eros. Erotica had become
fashionable, stimulated by an influx of French erotica and pornography.^2 By the mid-
seventeenth century, British connoisseurs were avidly devouring such classics as L’Escole
des Filles, L’Académie des Dames, and Venus dans le Cloître. Samuel Pepys, after reading
L’Escole des Filles, wrote in his diary that it was “a mighty lewd book, but not amiss for a
sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world.”^3 Sober women
were studiously informing themselves in the world’s villainy as well. By the eighteenth cen-
tury, freely translated English versions of French erotica had begun to engender indigenous
works by English authors. John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, published in two installments in 1748
and 1749, is generally considered the most notable of these racy narratives and the first to
be written in novel form. Libertinism as a lifestyle, once the sole prerogative of male aristo-
crats, now extended to the once stodgy bourgeoisie.
Another French import entering the mix of cultural influences on British botany was
the philosophy of mechanistic materialism, first outlined by Descartes in the seventeenth
century and taken to its logical extreme by Julien Offray de la Mettrie in the mid- eighteenth
century. Mettrie argued that the Scala Naturae, or Great Chain of Being, was, in fact, a con-
tinuum, and all creatures, from plants to humans, were governed by the same natural laws.
Such reasoning encouraged analogical and metaphorical thinking about plant sexuality.
The conjunction of satire, pornography, the discovery of sex in plants, and the penchant
for analogies proved irresistible to Edmund Curll and his Grub Street minions, giving rise
to a new, albeit short- lived, eighteenth- century literary fashion, which we will dub “phy-
toerotica.” Those who had read Sébastien Vaillant’s 1717 lecture were incited to follow
his lead. British phytoerotica fell into two main categories: bawdy verse, in which plants
were stand- ins for human genitalia, and erotic, classically inspired verse, in which stamens
and pistils were personified as husbands, wives, and lovers.^4 The former emphasized the
sexual act itself, had little to do with plants, and was aimed at a male audience. Thomas
Stretzer’s poems on the “natural histories” of “Arbor Vitae” and “Frutex Vulvaria” are the
type- specimens of this subgenre. In contrast, the latter type of phytoerotica emphasized
romance and foreplay, served as a heuristic device for teaching the Linnaean system, and
was aimed at a female audience. The supreme exemplar of this subgenre of phytoerotica
is Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of Plants. Even before its publication in 1789, prominent
opponents of the sexual system had excoriated Linnaeus for introducing lewdness into the
science of botany. Yet Systema Naturae was quite puritanical in comparison with Erasmus
Darwin’s poetic rendering. Hugely popular in England, especially among women, Darwin’s
The Loves of Plants turned the Linnaean sexual system into a cause célèbre, with supporters
and detractors lining up on either side.
The Argument for Human– Plant Analogy:
La Mettrie’s L’Homme Plant“Cogito ergo sum” Descartes famously declared: “I think; therefore I am.” Actually, Descartes
never wrote these words, Spinoza did— in a treatise on Descartes. In his Meditations on
First Philosophy, Descartes wondered whether or not he could trust his senses as accurate