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Anna Seward, Erasmus Darwin, and “The Loves of Plants”
William Withering’s censorship of Linnaean botany nettled his friend and mentor, Erasmus
Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather. Darwin— an inventor, poet, and physician of some
note— had recommended Withering for membership in the Lunar Society as a replacement
for Dr. William Small, who had died in 1775. The Lunar Society of Birmingham was an
informal dinner club and learned society that included intellectuals, physicians, industrial-
ists, and natural philosophers and counted Benjamin Franklin among its illustrious mem-
bers. The primary focus of the group was the interface between science and technology.
Erasmus Darwin regarded William Withering’s scrupulous avoidance of all mention of
sex in a book that purported to describe the Linnaean sexual system as a prudish bowdler-
ization. It also gave him the idea that there might be a market for an uncensored popular
presentation of the Linnaean sexual system. Around 1777, he installed a botanic garden in a
field about a mile from his home in Lichfield, arranging the plants according to the Linnaean
system. When the landscaping was completed, he invited the poet Anna Seward, the daugh-
ter of long- time friends from the cathedral close community in Lichfield, to visit the new
garden.^35 However, on the day of her visit, he was called away on a medical emergency, so she
visited the garden alone, bringing her notebook along. While seated among the flowers she
wrote a short poem inspired by Darwin’s handiwork and showed it to him when next she saw
him. He was so taken by it that he suggested that she should use it as the basis for a larger
poetic work on the Linnaean System, an idea that he himself had been mulling over for some
time. In her memoir, she relates that Darwin told her that her poem “suggests metamorpho-
sis of the Ovidian kind, though reversed. Ovid made men and women into flowers, plants,
and trees. You should make flowers, plants, and trees into men and women. I ... will write
the notes, which must be scientific; you shall write the verse.”^36 But Anna declined the invita-
tion on the grounds that the subject was “not strictly proper for a female pen.”^37
Although Seward cited feminine modesty as the reason for declining Darwin’s invitation,
she was no shrinking violet. She is assumed to be the author of the anonymous poem, “The
Backwardness of Spring Accounted For,” which commemorated the publication of the first
English translation of Systema Naturae in 1783. The translation had been the first of several
translations of Linnaeus’s works by the Lichfield Botanical Society, founded by Erasmus
Darwin. “The Backwardness of Spring Accounted For” describes the anarchic state of plants
before the arrival of Linnaeus, with classes and sexes cavorting willy- nilly.^38 By suggesting that
Linnaeus was on their side, the side of law and order, Seward’s portrait of the pre- Linnaean
plant kingdom as a licentious and ungovernable mob was designed to appeal to English conser-
vatives, increasingly disturbed by the ominous rumblings coming out of Paris. Before Linnaeus,
says Seward’s Mother Nature, vegetation was running amok in the grip of a “leveling spirit”:Vegetation of course was o’er run with disorder
From the wood & the wall to the bank & the border
Her wisest oeconomy strangely distorted
And her government cou’d not be longer supported
“Here rank & high titles,” say she, “have no merit
“And my weeds are brought up with a leveling spirit ...“... No wonder we see such a grinning of Corols [corollas]
“Amidst this confusion of manners and morals ...”