As I read “Loves of the Plants” and “Jacobin Plants’: Botany as Social Theory in the 1790s,” it was curious to think that something like Botany, which seems so methodical and tame in today’s world, could be so controversial in the late 18th century. If “nature’s laws” represented God’s divine order as Williams suggests in “Ideas of Nature,” I could see how the some of the licentious imagined social lives of the flowers would be contentious, but many of them seemed sweet and ethereal to my modern ears. I wonder just how popular the outrage was among the people of the time, because I believe Erasmus Darwin’s methods could be a very effective at simply raising interest in Botany and making in more accessible besides acting as a mode of social commentary. Personally, I thought the work was enjoyable to read and if think it would be much easier for a lay reader who was interested in the subject to remember the different parts of the flowers if the plants were imbued with social lives similar to humans.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Promiscuous Plants
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I agree in particular with the last part of this post. I feel the relating of the lives of plants to the lives of humans focused in on Darwin's underlying and possibly more powerful message beyond that of science, and that message I believe is to state how human nature is just as much a part of nature as the lives of any flower.
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