Behind the Green Door j 385385 385
Whose top sometimes the curious say
Is like a cherry seen in May;
Or glandiform— but’s found to be
More oft like nut of filberd- tree.
Quite the reverse of other fruit,
This grows, and dangles near the root,
Producing two of a nutmeg kind.
Twin- like, in one strong purse confin’d ...
The fruits receive a strong supply
And yield a viscous balmy juice
Adapted to VULVARIA’s use ^14And so on and on and on for a great while.
In 1741, Stretzer published The Natural History of the Frutex Vulvaria or Flowering Shrub,
an even cruder companion piece to the Arbor Vitae. Supposedly written by Philogenes
Clitorides, “one of the missionaries of the Society of Jesuits for propagating knowledge in
foreign parts,” the essay was dedicated to “the two fair owners of the finest Vulva r i a s in the
three Kingdoms.” In the dedication, Stretzer writes that although Great Britain has always
been home to the best Vulva r i a s in the “universe,”yet the trees that have been grafted upon them, for these two and twenty years last
past, have so far degenerated, that our plants are held in the utmost contempt in all
foreign countries, as fit only to be piss’d upon.Stretzer laments that since the manly days of the Act of Habeas Corpus, the Bill of
Exclusion, the exile of James II, and the conclusion of the Treaty of Utrecht, “we have never
done any great feats, but seem to be damnably off our mettle,”^15 a predicament Stretzer
blames on the “degeneracy of our Trees of Life”:How much then, beauteous ladies, must the whole nation be obliged to your indefati-
gable endeavors to restore their vigor, by inoculating none but the finest plants upon
your flowering shrubs.Stretzer suggests that such a union should be fertile because, according to the learned herb-
alist “Leonard Fuckius,” Vulva r i a belongs to the same genus as the Arbor Vitae and is, in
fact, none other than the “female Arbor Vitae.” As to the natural history of Frutex Vulvaria,
it is “a flat low shrub, which always grows in a moist, warm valley, at the foot of a little hill,
etc.” Stretzer continues for some time in a similar vein, a testimony to the existence of a
receptive audience for this sort of work.
The poem Mimosa: or, The Sensitive Plant (1779) by James Perry belongs to the same
subgenre of phytoerotica as Arbor Vitae, in which the plant as a whole serves as a phal-
lic symbol.^16 Dedicated to the botanist Joseph Banks, who traveled to the South Pacific
with Captain Cook on the Endeavour between 1768 and 1771, the poem satirizes Banks’s
purported sexual exploits in Tahiti, although the bulk of its verses feature salacious gossip