Flora: History’s Ultimate Mating Metaphor
The flower’s leaves ... serve as bridal beds which the creator has so gloriously arranged ... and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much greater solemnity. When now the bed is so prepared, it is time for the bridegroom to embrace his beloved bride and offer her his gifts.
- Carl Linnaeus, Swedish Botanist, 1707-1778
Proud Gloriosa led by three chosen swains,
The blushing captives of her virgin chains ...
When time’s rude hand a bark of wrinkles spread
Round her limbs, and silver’d o’er her head,
Three other youths her riper years engage,
The flatter’d victims of her wily age.
- Erasmus Darwin, 1789 (grandfather of Charle Darwin)
Secreting honey, it gives a delightful food to the humming bird, and Nature has been so anxious for the preservation of this tribe, that besides multiplying the number of males (stamina) to one pistillum or female, there are also several of its flowers which possess only a cluster of males.... SHE comes peeping from her purple crest with mischief fraught: from her green covert projects a horrid spear of darkest jet, which she brandishes aloft: issuing from her nostrils flies a noisome vapour, infecting the ambient air: her hundred arms are interspersed with white, as in the garments of the inquisition; and on her swollen trunk are observed the speckles of a mighty dragon; her sex is strangely intermingled with the opposite ! confusion dire ! -all framed for horror; or kind to warn the traveller that her fruits are poison-berries, grateful to the sight but fatal to the taste; such is the plan of PROVIDENCE, and such HER wise resolves.
- Robert Thornton, Temple of Flora, 1804
