I was just granted a plot in a community garden. I look forward to the generosity of rhubarb, peonies, tomatoes, and basil. My mother is a prolific gardener and gave me my own garden plot when I was thirteen or so, and at the time, I felt proud to say “this is mine.” Now, I’m again excited to have a little piece of garden to myself, but the magic is in the fact that it is NOT mine—it (and I) will be part of a community. On a grander scale, I now see dirt as alive with micro organisms, a constant churn of nutrients and life cycles, and plants pursuing their patterns of growth and reproduction as bodies, as beings. The strawberries I will plant and eat are ripened ovaries, the scent of the peonies I’ve inherited in the plot lure pollinators to their carpels (female parts) and stamens (male parts) to pollinate.
I’m fascinated by how plants work, so for this next installment of my Deep Dive series, I want to talk about plants. Specifically, plant sex. Most people’s relationships to plants are focused on their sexual organs, their flowers or fruit. We’re deeply drawn to these parts, hold fascinations with flowers, find joy in berries. There are metaphors to be found. Maybe plant sex a weird topic (no weirder than pigeons, the color blue, or diegetic sound), and I have no idea where it’ll lead me, but I’m grateful you’re along for the ride. Buckle up folks. I think this one will be fun.
Let’s set the tone with this poem by sam sax. I love how laughter and loneliness coexist in his poems. In case you had any doubt about the theme, “Spring is for Lovers” seems like perfect proof of the possibilities to be discovered in pollen.
Spring is not the orgy the dead philosophs believed. It is much lonelier. Each plant crying into the wind, hoping somewhere something will receive its desperate heaving.
I made the mistake of teaching Toni Morrison’s Beloved in my first couple of months as a teacher. I will never forget the “oh fuck” feeling as we finished the first chapter and I looked at a room full of students just four years younger than me and realized I was in way over my head. We had just read this passage about corn. In it, the now middle-aged Sethe remembers her first time with her husband, Halle, in the cornfields on the plantation where they were enslaved as she considers coupling with Paul D, who was there, just out of sight.
Paul D sighed and turned over. Sethe took the opportunity afforded by his movement to shift as well. Looking at Paul D’s back, she remembered that some of the corn stalks broke, folded down over Halle’s back, and among the things her fingers clutched were husk and cornsilk hair.
How loose the silk. How jailed down the juice.
The jealous admiration of the watching men melted with the feast of new corn they allowed themselves that night. Plucked from the broken stalks that Mr. Garner could not doubt was the fault of the raccoon. Paul F wanted his roasted; Paul A wanted his boiled and now Paul D couldn’t remember how finally they’d cooked those ears too young to eat. What he did remember was parting the hair to get to the tip, the edge of his fingernail just under, so as not to graze a single kernel.
The pulling down of the tight sheath, the ripping sound always convinced her it hurt.
As soon as one strip of husk was down, the rest obeyed and the ear yielded up to him its shy rows, exposed at last. How loose the silk. How quick the jailed-up flavor ran free.
No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.
How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free.
After reading this, one of the teenage boys incredulously asked if the corn was really a metaphor or if you could just make meaning out of anything as ridiculous as corn, and some whip-smart girl saved me by snapping, “she knew what she was doing.” Despite that horrible and hilarious memory, this passage is still stunning and sexy-as-hell.
Corn, by the way, is incredibly interesting if we’re talking about plant sex. The male tassels shed pollen which is carried on the wind or falls onto the silk and corn ears below. The silk carries pollen to ovaries, which ripen into juicy kernels. I could ramble on about corn, but Robin Wall Kimmerer does it better, so go read this incredible article in Emergence Magazine.
sax’s poem reminds me of the dark humor in a great Courtney Barnett song, “Avant Gardener.” Both the poem and song have speakers humbled by the seasonal habits of plants, but below the narratives, both depict a distinctly modern existential ennui. Pollen, bursting forth full of life and sex, chokes and challenges the two speakers who are removed not just from nature but from their own existence in society.
Another catchy-as-heck song by Hayley Heynderickx shares that same exhaustion at living in this society.
And I've been doubtful
of all that I have dreamed of,
the brink of my existence essentially is a comedy…
When she starts screaming “I need to start a garden,” breaking the nostalgic sweetness of the song’s riff, you really feel it: life is fucking hard. Starting a garden, an idealistic gesture at stepping away from the sour milk of life, “is just as hard” as making art in a society that squashes dreams.
Hurray for the Riff Raff’s “Rhododendron” is a little more associative and pollen causes no personal problems, but still, flowers offer lightness to balance the weight of being human.
Maybe I just really like all three of these songs. Maybe, as a teenage boy once accused me, I’m making meaning where there isn’t any. Maybe I’m cynical, belong to the most economically fucked over generation, and am dependent on little glimmers amidst a soul-crushing social landscape. But I think there’s something really relatable about each of these songs. They find humor and flowers amidst the dreariness of participating in late-stage capitalism. They make art of it.
I saw my first early magnolia today. I live in Boston, which is a city of magnolias. Each year they announce the end of winter with their musky perfume, their pulpy petals, their way of holding the new light a little longer after dusk falls. The story of my 17 years in this city could be told through poem fragments, scattered through Word docs, phone notes, and different journals, about the particularity of magnolia petals. I think this poem is so damn good and does a better job than I ever will of saying what magnolias mean.
awaiting a carriage, any
by Bernard Ferguson
it’s the numerous letters the magnolias make
as they open—one, then another, and then
a letter i don’t quite know yet—that makes any wounded
heart seem more wounded and, despite its chances,
not worth the time. i thought i’d be used to it
by now. i stood in the greening field, i famously
like to recount, and waved my arms
so i could, at last, be claimed, be carried away.
but nothing good descended. no avian form,
no cloud, just a swarm of blue things:
flung twilight, withdrawal, an opal blame.
sure, i’ve been lonely before, i always say, but not
like this. you have to survive the bad season
to make it to the season of reversals, the magnolias
leading the fray. though that’s not
what we call it, at least not where i’m from
where there is a single, impenetrable era
that begins just as soon as it ends.
you have to survive the bad season
to make it to the season of reversals, the magnolias
leading the fray.
Fergason’s poem goes so perfectly with Ada Limón’s poem. Both find in flower’s abundance a continuing-on-despiteness that echoes in the three songs as well.
Instructions On Not Giving Up
by Ada Limón
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor's
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it's the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world's baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I'll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I'll take it all.
a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.
There are very cool stories behind the art featured in this issue of Notions & Notes, and I needed to interrupt the plant sex content to tell you to go learn about:
the Japanese pioneering photographer, Kazumasa Ogawa, who hand tinted his images of flowers and felt they expressed a profound connection to his homeland.
the late-Rennaissance botanist, Basilius Besler, who basically changed how we think about plants and therefore our entire relationship to them.
the work of Karl Bossfeldt, a self-taught photographer who built his own cameras to take ground-breaking photographs of the minutia of plants.
the life of Mary Granville Delany, who became an artist in her 70s to create nearly 200, scientifically accurate botanical portraits using collage.
Isobel Wohl’s “Citrus Paradisi” appeared in the far-too-briefly-lived Astra Magazine, and if you read Notions & Notes as a curated/themed list of interesting stuff for you to explore, then consider this a recommendation for that magazine’s entire two issues more than this particular essay. That said, this was a fascinating essay exploring the allure and revulsion, the pain and pleasure, the raw sex of grapefruit. In this essay, She explores the strong reactions—people either love it or hate it—the fruit garners. Wohl writes one of the ideas I’ve taken for granted in writing about pollen, corn, and fruit:
Since the writing of Genesis, if not before, fruit has stood for sex. Beyond Eve’s apple, there are endless references in art and literature, from the pomegranate in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine and the post-coital slice of watermelon Gurov callously eats in Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” to the cherry stem Audrey Horne (Sherilynn Fenn) ties with her tongue in Twin Peaks. Botanically speaking, a fruit is the ripened ovary of a plant. There is also an experiential logic to the sex metaphor. Something hangs out of reach (an apple) or hides coyly amid leaves (a blackberry); it swells as it ripens until it can wait no longer; it is plucked and eaten, giving pleasure and satisfaction. But these soon fade. A new hunger comes, or the old hunger returns. (Who can tell them apart?)
In analyzing an image of grapefruit, peeled and split open, that was used in a banned ad campaign for menstrual products, Wohl embraces a complexity that I think is often missing from conversations about sex. Yes, sex is pleasure and desire, but sex is also messy and grotesque, and funny, fleshy, flushed.
To start with, the fruit in question has not been cut in half. It has not been made into its own serving dish, offering up its own insides for someone else’s delight or nourishment. Instead, careful fingers have peeled it and split it in two, revealing its segments long and fat and whole, as if in their full truth. And the segments — the labia — are irregular; the one on the left has a few swellings at its outer edge. Light catches lines of white stringy material in the membrane. Not very attractive. No matter. No attempt will be made to blur the particularity of individual features into some standard of beauty.
In an era when we’re flooded with content, and ideas are repeated in different ways again and again and simplified in the cultural discourse, I liked that this essay was not like anything else I’d seen before. And it’s conclusion is a step toward complexity:
[…]we might find that “liking” or “not liking” something is an impoverished shorthand for a complex constellation of pleasure, revulsion, and uncertainty that changes instant to instant.
As I try to understand the meaning to be made from this deep dive on plant sex, I think Wohl’s conclusion—of accepting complexity and contradiction—is the right one.
Look back at the content. Pollen is “just sperm floating in the air” and loneliness and queerness. Your garden gives you an asthma attack. Corn is ridiculous and hot. Fruit is tangy and sweet. The abundance of the plant world is “a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.” There’s hope and despair and determination and resignation in this living. And plants, their design for continuing life, their insistent spreading of seeds, their naked vulnerability and resilience, remind us of that continuing-on-despite.