398 i Flora Unveiled
love and furnished with powers of reproducing their species.” As he wrote in his philosophi-
cal poem The Temple of Nature (1803), flowers reveled in the joy of sex:
Hence on green leaves the sexual Pleasures dwell,
And Loves and Beauties crowd the blossom’s bell;
The wakeful Anther in his silken bed
O’er the pleas’d Stigma bows his waxen head;
With meeting lips, and mingling smiles, they sup
Ambrosial dew- drops from the nectar’d cup;
Or buoy’d in air the plumy Lover springs,
And seeks his panting bride on Hymen- wings.^45In “The Loves of Plants,” Darwin cited the dioecious aquatic plant Vallisneria, or eelgrass,
as an example of entire male flowers exhibiting animal- like mating behavior: “The male
flowers of Vallisneria come even closer to apparent animality, for they detach themselves
from the plant and float on the surface of the waters to meet their females.” An illustration
of this phenomenon is shown in Figure 14.1A,B. Gazing at the pile up of tiny male flowers
on the (relatively) large floating female flower, it is easy to understand why Darwin and
other eighteenth- century botanists thought they were witnessing active mounting of the
female flower by the male flowers, although, what actually happens is somewhat different.
The leaves of Vallisneria grow submerged in lakes or streams, while the larger female
flowers, borne singly within a spathe, rise to the surface by the uncoiling of their long spi-
ral stalks. The tiny submerged male flowers grow crowded together on a spadix enclosed
by a spathe tethered by short stalks. At maturity, the male spathes open and the small,
unopened flowers detach from their spadix. Upon reaching the surface, they slowly open
and are moved along the water surface by wind and currents. When they come near the
female flower, they aggregate there within the cup- like depression created by the weight of
the female flower on the water surface. In his 1917 paper, R. B. Wylie remarks that “as many
as 50 staminate flowers may be caught in a single depression, thus forming conspicuous
patches on the surface of the water.”^46 Under these conditions, the staminate flowers slide
down and upend onto the female flower, transferring their pollen to the two sticky stigmas
(Fig ure 14 .1B).
Given his assumption that plants had sensations like animals, Darwin was especially
intrigued by plants exhibiting thigmonasty, the ability to move in response to touch. In
stark contrast to James Perry’s phallocentric interpretation in The Sensitive Plant, Darwin
personified Mimosa as a chaste “eastern” maiden:
Weak with nice sense, the chaste Mimosa stands,
From each rude touch withdraws her timid hands,
Shuts her sweet eye- lids to approaching night,
And hails with freshen’d charms the rising light,
Veiled with gay decency and modest pride,
Slow to the mosque she moves, the eastern bride.