384 i Flora Unveiled
Although Mettrie writes whimsically, he clearly believes that his analogies between
plants and people are valid. Indeed, the second chapter of L’Homme Plant describes the
ways in which plants and animals differ from each other, and the third chapter concludes
by characterizing the ladder of life as a continuum “so imperceptively graduated that nature
climbs it without ever missing a step through all its diverse creations.” This was a widely held
view in the eighteenth century, one shared by both Ray and Linnaeus.
Whereas Mettrie approached the analogy between plants and people in a scientific spirit,
the poem The Man- Plant: or, a Scheme for Increasing and Improving the British Breed (1752),
by Vincent Miller, was clearly satirical in the tradition of Jonathan Swift.^12 The author of
The Man Plant expresses his concern over the decline of contemporary British manhood as
manifested by the recent dearth of military victories. To rectify the situation, he advocates
increasing the number and vigor of British men by applying horticultural techniques that
shorten the gestation time for childbirth. The female body, the poet declared, is comparable
to “a flower plant, in the method of Linaeus [sic]”: “her clothing is her calyx, her breasts are
her nectarium, her womb is her pistillus, her vagina is her style unicus, her cervix is her stigma
oblongum, her ovaries are her pericarpium, and her seed is her semen.”^13 According to the
poet, thirty- nine- day- old embryos would be extracted from the pistilli of pregnant women,
placed in “bladders” containing liquid, and planted like seeds in soil- filled wicker baskets,
where they would thrive and grow until harvested. Women would thus become like “those
fertile fields that yield two or three crops in a season.” In addition to echoing the ancient
metaphor of women as “fruitful fields,” The Man- Plant anticipates the account of test- tube
babies in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and the nightmarish depiction of the exploita-
tion of the female reproductive system in the service of the state in Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale.
Bawdy Garden Verse: Arbor Vitae, Vulvaria Frutex,
and The Sensitive PlantEven before Mettrie’s L’Homme Plant, British wags had already begun to mine sexual anal-
ogies between plants and animals as a source of ribald verse. The lengthy anonymous poem
The Natural History of the Arbor Vitae, or the Tree of Life, published in 1732, was penned
by Thomas Stretzer, one of Edmund Curll’s stable of hacks. According to a footnote in the
introduction, the piece was originally read to “an honourable SOCIETY near Crane Court,
in Fleet street” (a gentleman’s club) who had “gone half through it before they were aware
of the Deception.” The author therefore addressed the published version of the poem to the
“Fair Sex,” which is “acknowledg’d the quickest of apprehension, especially in works of this
nature:” It begins
The TR EE OF LIFE, another name
For P- n- s, but in sense the same,
Is a rich plant of balmy juice
And own’d to be of sovereign use,
Consisting of one single stem
That’s straight, as is a pistillum;