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traditional symbol of virgin purity, was so thoroughly feminized in art, literature, religion,
and fashion that the sexualist claim that most flowers were hermaphroditic struck some as
beyond perverse. Although the majority of botanists embraced the new paradigm, a small
but vocal minority vigorously opposed it on moral grounds. In their desperate efforts to
discourage the use of the Linnaean sexual system, eighteenth- century asexualists cited a raft
of philosophical, religious, and pedagogical reasons as justification for rejecting it.
During the latter half of the eighteenth century, opposition to the sexual theory grew
more intense. Ironically, the same period also saw remarkable progress in two crucial areas
of floral biology: hybridization and insect pollination. The breakthrough studies on plant
hybridization by Joseph Gottlieb Koelreuter, together with the brilliant insights into flo-
ral ecology by Christian Konrad Sprengel, provided the most convincing evidence yet for
the sexual theory. Yet despite this growing mountain of evidence, late eighteenth- century
asexualists maintained their ideological purity.The Ideology of AsexualismAs late as the eighteenth century, Aristotelian hierarchical beliefs about organisms, accord-
ing to which plants were too low on the Scala Natura to be capable of sex, still persisted. To
some, the sexual theory of plants challenged not only traditional hierarchies in nature, but
traditional hierarchies in society as well. Conservative asexualists, especially those who felt
threatened by Enlightenment political theories, generally objected to any idea that under-
mined the status quo in either nature or society.
Religion also played a role in the debate. In his book, Nature’s Second Kingdom, François
Delaporte pointed out that, during the eighteenth century, the study of botany was closely
allied with religion.^1 One of the French philosophes who made the connection explicit was
the Marquis de Condorcet, a French mathematician, philosopher, and friend of Thomas
Jefferson. For Condorcet, the close relationship between botany and religion formed the
basis of Natural Theology:In reading the history of the sciences, some people have formed the belief that some
scientists are more disposed to piety and others less, depending on what sort of knowl-
edge they cultivated; and botanists, these people think, deserve to be placed in the
front rank.^2Botanists, states Condorcet, were “more disposed to piety” because they studied the
plant kingdom, which “seems to call up more forcefully the idea of a first cause, to tell us
more about its boons, and to incline our soul more naturally to gratitude.” Eden was, after
all, a garden in which Adam and Eve would have lived out their sexually inchoate, trouble-
free existences in the benign presence of God, if they had only refrained from eating the
forbidden fruit. Having sinned, they must suffer, in Hamlet’s words, the “heart- ache and
the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” Plants, Condorcet claims, have the unique
ability to evoke memories of that lost Eden, when humanity was still innocent and under
God’s protection. No doubt the belief in the asexuality of plants contributed to the per-
ceived compatibility of plants and religion, reinforced by hundreds of years of Christian
depictions of the Holy Virgin with flowers.