The Adonis annua (sometimes identified in the eighteenth century as A. autumnalis or A. aestivalis) is the final species in Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791). It stands in sharp contrast to Canna indica, the species that begins “The Loves of the Plants,” the poem’s second half. Whereas C. indica is a monogamous plant, possessing one stamen and one pistil, A. annua is of the polyandrous class and polygynous order, that is, it possesses many stamens and many pistils. Hence, the “virtuous” monogamy that began the poem is now supplanted by a “licentious Hymen,” the god of marriage who joins this flower in polygamous marriage.

Unlike Darwin’s other depictions of marriage, this passage steps out of the exclusively vegetable world and into the human one by reference to the recent expedition of Captain James Cook. Accompanied by the prominent botanist, Joseph Banks, and student of Linnæus, Daniel Solander, they voyaged to the island of Otaheite. At least, that was how Europeans (and Darwin in his passage) referred to the island in the eighteenth century until a later voyage by Cook, during which linguistic analysis yielded the realization that “O” denotes a definite article, meaning that “Otaheite” was really “Taheite,” or “Tahiti.” The intentions of Cook’s first expedition to Tahiti with Banks and Solander in 1769 were manifold; however, the purpose which instigated it was the opportunity to measure the transit of Venus, which would be visible from the island and explains Darwin’s reference to the planet in the poem. Measuring the transit of Venus would enable a better calculation of the Sun’s distance from the Earth, and, in turn, help to establish the size of the solar system more accurately. Indeed, Darwin invokes this scientific investigation in order to juxtapose the immutability of nature’s laws with the relativity of cultural norms, especially those regarding love and sex.

He broaches this cultural relativity by referring to the sexual practices of the Areoi, the nobility of the island. They lived in sexual freedom or, in Darwin’s words, in one “promiscuous marriage,” thus reflecting the same polygamous condition of A. annua. Darwin never visited Tahiti himself and thus relied on the travelogues of others (like John Hawkesworth’s account, excerpted below) for his information. As one might imagine, these accounts often revealed as much about eighteenth-century English society as it did about Polynesian society.

Darwin’s portrayal of the Areoi is complex. While he does not fail to characterize the marriage as “promiscuous,” “licentious,” and “meretricious,” which, in addition to his representation of the women in his poem more generally as either femme fatales or virtuous ladies, evidences an eighteenth-century normative view of love and sex, Darwin also seems to celebrate the Areoi society, recognizing the arbitrariness of English or any such norms. Linnæus’s sexual system had not only disclosed the sex lives of plants, but also the possibilities open to humans, even if Linnæus’s social conservatism never intended such possibilities to be considered as real. Yet, in Darwin’s final stanza, he transgressed the boundary between the plant and animal kingdom and thus showed the reality of these possibilities for humans. He seized on the libertinism latent within Linnæus’s sexual system.

At the same time, Darwin’s acknowledgment of these new sexual possibilities as real was by no means a univocal support and promotion of them. His tension between championing these new approaches to sex and love and repairing to the socio-cultural ideal of sexual modesty, especially as it applied to women, represents a perduring aspect of the larger strained relationship between women and botany in the eighteenth century.

Linnæus’s taxonomy unabashedly focused on the sex lives of plants and thus immediately invited scrutiny. Consequently, even before the question could be asked whether this system of botany was a proper activity for women, a whole slew of critics showed up to denounce Linnæus’s whole enterprise, with some denying the sexuality of plants outright. (It must be kept in mind that plant sexuality was still a quite recent discovery at that time.) The editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica  (1773), William Smellie, provides a particularly vehement criticism along these lines: “A man would not naturally expect to meet with disgusting strokes of obscenity in a system of botany. But it is a certain fact, that obscenity is the very basis of the Linnæan system. The names of his classes, orders, &c. convey often the vilest and most unnatural ideas” (p. 653).

Darwin was himself party to an acrid dispute concerning the “obscenity” of Linnæus’s system. The other party, William Withering, was one of the first to translate Linnæus’s system into English. His translation, however, achieved more than just finding English equivalents to Linnæus’s Latin, for Withering aimed to present it in an “English dress,” that is, to make it appropriate for women. This meant that Withering replaced Linnæus’s sexual terms with ones that were more modest; for example, he substituted “chive” for “stamen” and “pointal” for “pistil.” Yet, we can imagine the limitations of this bowdlerization, given that Linnæus’s entire taxonomy was based on the sex lives of plants! Darwin immediately recognized these shortcomings and resolved, along with the other two members of the Lichfield Botanical Society, to produce a “literal and accurate” translation of Linnæus, stamens and pistils intact.

Despite their differences, Withering and Darwin both translated botany into the common vernacular, making a science that had only been available previously to scholars trained in Latin now accessible to a wider public, including women. Indeed, a decade before The Botanic Garden was published, Darwin remarks in a letter that he intends the work to induce women to study botany.

His efforts, in addition to authors like Withering, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and others did encourage the increased study of botany by women as well as the production of botanical texts by female authors. Many of these works followed in the style of Darwin, most notably Francis Arabella Rowden’s A Poetical Introduction to the Study of Botany (1801), by combining verse with explanatory scientific footnotes. However, these female authors did not have the freedom to be as candid about sexuality as Darwin had been, for to be taken seriously as botanical writers they had to maintain the modesty then thought to be appropriate for a woman. This modesty manifested itself in the fact that women writers would not often publicly claim authorship for their works, letting “By a Lady” stand in for their names, as in Maria Jacson’s Botanical Dialogues (1797). Modesty also meant foregoing Latin terms in favor of common ones, since displaying the former in public would be thought indecent for a woman. Finally, many female botanical authors relied on the income produced from their works, an income that would be put into jeopardy if they diverged too much from acceptable means of discourse. This was particularly true of the early botanical illustrator, Elizabeth Blackwell (whose illustrations are featured on several pages of this exhibition). Her husband embarked on an unwise business venture that quickly landed him in debtor’s prison. His incarceration and the lack of income because of it caused Elizabeth and her family to fall further into debt. She responded with the only skill available to her: drawing. Realizing the need for a new illustrated herbal, she took on the job of three artisans—sketcher, engraver, and painter—and produced a highly-acclaimed, successful work.

The relationship between botany and women during this period is a complicated one. While botany offered women opportunities to increase their education and pursue livelihoods, some authors used it to maintain and bolster gender norms, advancing restrictive ideals of modesty, delicacy, or frivolity when it came to women studying plants. Darwin’s own views on love and sex, expressed via the marriages of plants throughout his poem, reflect the tension between these poles. Although his Botanic Garden certainly perpetuated traditional eighteenth-century gender norms, it also galvanized a cadre of women to pursue botany more intensely than ever before, producing, in turn, a remarkable art and science of the vegetable world.