Flora Unveiled

242 i Flora Unveiled

[I] t is stated that in a palm- grove of natural growth the female trees do not produce if

there are no males, and that each male tree is surrounded by several females with more

attractive foliage that bend and bow towards him; while the male bristling with leaves

erected impregnates the rest of them by his exhalation and by the mere sight of him,

and also by his dust; and that when the male tree is felled the females afterwards in

their widowhood become barren. And so fully is their sexual union understood that

mankind has actually devised a method for impregnating them by means of the flower

and down collected from the males, and indeed sometimes by merely sprinkling their

dust on the females.^24

Pliny, who cannot resist a good anecdote however implausible, seems torn between
the fantasy of courtship among the palms and a dry, scientific explanation. On the other
hand, Pliny, unlike Theophrastus, didn’t hesitate to equate pollination with sexual repro-
duction. In fact, in another passage, Pliny appears to generalize the sexuality of palm
trees to other trees and plants, a conceptual leap neither Aristotle or Theophrastus dared
to make:

The more diligent enquirers into the operations of Nature state that all trees, or rather

all plants, and other productions of the earth, belong to either one sex or the other; a

fact which it may be sufficient to notice on the present occasion, and one which mani-

fests itself in no tree more than in the palm.^25

A quick gloss of this sentence might lead one to conclude that Pliny, however fallible, was
the first to discover the universality of sex in plants. However, upon closer reading it is clear
that the generalization is based on the erroneous idea that all plants are dioecious, belong-
ing to “one sex or the other.” Elsewhere in Natural History Pliny describes the properties
of male and female plants strictly in terms of their wood, growth habits, the sizes of their
fruits, and other vegetative properties— spurious notions that Theophrastus had dismissed
as folklore. Pliny’s distinction between male and female plants was not based on the sexual
structures of the flower, but on the same culturally defined gender associations we encoun-
tered earlier in Greek botany. Yet Pliny deserves an honored place in the history of botany
for giving us in his description of the Madonna Lily the term stamen (staminum, Latin for
the warp of an upright loom).^26 Pliny also used the term “stamens” in his description of rose
blossoms:

Gradually acquiring a ruddy tint, this bud opens little by little, until at last it comes

into full blow, developing the calyx, and embracing the yellow- pointed stamens which

stand erect in the center of it.^27

Pliny thus takes a small, but significant step beyond Theophrastus by naming the pollen-
containing structures of flowers. However, he makes no mention of the pollen contained in
the anthers and makes no connection to the “dust” of palm trees, so he missed the functional
significance of the structure he had identified. Pliny’s generalization of sex to all plants was
therefore not based on the identification of pollen as the male reproductive structure, and
thus we cannot credit him with discovering sex in plants.