Flora Unveiled

224 i Flora Unveiled

branches of the date- bearing palm, to let the gall- fly enter the dates and ripen them,

and to prevent the fruit from falling off. The male- palms, like the wild fig- trees, have

usually the gall- fly in their fruit.^42

Although fruit production in date palms resembled caprification in figs in some respects,
such as the existence of “male” and “female” trees, Theophrastus recognized that the two
processes were not identical. For example, in dates, unlike figs, “gall insects” did not seem to
play a role, and there indeed seemed to be a true “union of the two sexes,” which, he main-
tained, was not the case in figs:

With dates it is helpful to bring the male to the female; for it is the male which causes

the fruit to persist and ripen, and this process some call, by analogy, “ ‘the use of the

wild fruit.”‘ The process is thus performed: when the male palm is in flower, they at

once cut off the rachis on which the flower is, just as it is, and shake the bloom with

the flower and the dust over the fruit of the female, and, if this is done to it, it retains

the fruit and does not shed it. In the cases both of the fig and the date it appears

that the “ ‘male”‘ renders aid to the “ ‘female,”‘ for the fruit- bearing tree is called

“ ‘female”‘— but while in the latter case [dates] there is a union of the two sexes, in

the former [figs] the result is brought about somewhat differently.^43

In this passage, Theophrastus seems to teeter on the edge of recognizing sex in date
palms. He notes that the phenomenon of artificial pollination in date palms seems to be
somewhat different from the caprification of figs:

That the fruit does not remain on the female date- palm unless you shake the flower of

the male over it together with the dust ... occurs only in the date- palm, but is similar

to the caprification of fig trees. From these instances one would be most inclined to

infer that even a female tree cannot by itself bear completely formed fruit; except that

this should hold not of just one or two female trees but of all or most of them, since

this is how we decide the nature of the class of females. And in the cases before us that

of the date- palm is very strange indeed, since caprification is considered to have a clear

explanation.^44

Theophrastus wrestled with the dilemma that the date palm and the fig tree seemed
to be sexual, demonstrating that “even a female tree cannot by itself bear completely
formed fruit.” Against such a proposition, “all or most” other female trees do not seem
to require a male tree for fruit production. Curiously, although Theophrastus was well
aware that pistachio nut trees (Pistachio atlantica) are also dioecious, he never compared
them to either dates or figs.^45 In the very next paragraph, he describes mulberry trees,
but fails to mention their dioecism. Had he included these two other examples in his
treatise, he might have been forced to conclude that all female trees required the dust
from the male tree, which might have led him to generalize pollination to hermaphro-
ditic flowers.
Aristotle had indeed noticed that hermaphroditic flowers also produce “dust” that was col-
lected by bees for food, but such “bee bread” did not appear to have any function for the flower.