Behind the Green Door j 387387 387
And blessing all, yet still doth she
Delight in due gradation.As in her other plants and flowers,
So here, she proves her mighty powers;
And makes them great and small:
Some more erect, and some more strong,
Some whose motions are more long;
And some who sooner fall.Comparable sexual satires were also written about nonbotanical subjects, including new
theories about human reproduction and electricity.^19 Scientific advances were a common
subject of eighteenth- century satirical verse in Britain, whereas the Catholic Church was
the main target of French erotica. In England, scientists were beginning to rival the clergy
as purveyors of truth, but their privileged status also made them targets for ridicule. Poems
like The Sensitive Plant, in which botany was mocked, took scientists down a peg and may
have helped ease anxieties about unsettling new discoveries, such as plant sex.
Hoping to stem the tide of such ribald satires, a small but vocal minority of botanists
reacted by rejecting both the sexual theory of plants and its taxonomic offshoot, the
Linnaean sexual system, damning them both as scientifically untenable and highly offen-
sive. The two opposing camps came to be known as the “sexualists” and the “asexualists.”Siegesbeck’s Attacks on the Sexual System and
the Sexual Theory
“What man,” J. G. Siegesbeck railed in his 1737 diatribe against the Linnaean sexual system,
“will ever believe that God Almighty should have introduced such confusion, or rather such
shameful whoredom, for the propagation of the reign of plants. Who will instruct young
students in such a voluptuous system without scandal?”^20 Siegesbeck is generally regarded as
a middling botanist, and if it were not for his over- the- top rant against the Linnaean classi-
fication system his name would receive scant attention in the annals of botany. Yet his harsh
criticisms of the sexual system caused Linnaeus sleepless nights and provoked a cascade of
vindictive, tit- for- tat exchanges between the two botanists that illustrates what high stakes
the combatants believed they were playing for.
Johann Georg Siegesbeck, a Prussian, had studied botany at the University of Helmstedt
under the distinguished physician- botanist, Lorenz Heister. Heister had established a
botanical garden at Helmstedt and, with Siegesbeck’s help, had built it into one of the larg-
est in Germany. In 1735, Siegesbeck was appointed director at the Apothecary Garden of St.
Petersburg and continued as director for seven years, after which he left to become Professor
of Botany at the Russian Academy of Science. During his tenure as director of the Apothecary
Garden, he organized many collecting expeditions throughout Siberia and brought back a
huge number of species, making it one of the richest plant collections in Europe and attract-
ing the attention of Linnaeus, who was particularly interested in the Siberian flora.^21
A possible clue to Siegesbeck’s hatred of the Linnaean sexual system lies in a previous dis-
pute between Linnaeus and Siegesbeck’s mentor, Lorenz Heister. Heister had corresponded