We have been taught that one of the differences between animals and plants is that animals are able to move, yet science has shown us that plants, though rooted in one place, are highly mobile. Many plants, for instance, are heliotropic (heliotrope is the name for the sunflower), bending toward the sun. They send roots into the ground for nourishment and moisture — “the roots of a sunflower can reach down eight feet, nibbling, evaluating, growing toward the best sources of food,” says Sharman Apt Russell in her book Anatomy of a Rose^[17] — and sprout upward toward the light, a miraculous force counter to gravity which Goethe, a great plant enthusiast, named “levity.”^[18] Most plants turn, reach, open, close, and quiver with excitement, as we do. They flower and produce seeds. They suffer weather and time, age, and die back. Their abbreviated lives often serve, in poetry and paintings, as allegory, in accelerated fashion, of our own human life processes. Mondrian loved chrysanthemums, the unraveling, aging quality I love in the prairie paintbrush. Shapiro says Mondrian “revealed his sense of time and suffering” in these flowers.^[19]

Most plants turn, reach, open, close, and quiver with excitement, as we do. They flower and produce seeds. They suffer weather and time, age, and die back.

And then, there is sex. Except for the mosses, liverworts, conifers, cycads, ferns and gingko trees, all plants flower in order to reproduce, writes Russell.^[20] Dressed flamboyantly and heavily perfumed, they attract the bees, butterflies, birds, and even mammals that will carry their pollen to the awaiting stigma of another flower. Wide open or seductive in their ploys of lip and tongue, they are shameless. Of Mondrian’s flower paintings, so different than the rigid and programmatic grids of his modernist experiments, Shapiro observes, “They remained with their emotional curves a powerful force to trouble him.”^[21]Mondrian, celibate for the last part of his life, Graves, Mapplethorpe, Warhol who were gay, Manet suffering from syphilis — a psychosexual reading of these paintings will stall us as absolutely as an allegorical reading would, and is not the direction I would like to go in this essay. Yet the vulnerability of the flowers, their overt sexuality, their contrived attractiveness, to which we are always attracted, is most often described as female. “We might think of the flowers, then, as the real nudes in the œuvre of Mondrian and place our embarrassment [that he is painting flowers rather than grids] as a fear of desire,” writes Shapiro.^[22]

Novalis
BY Freidrich Eduard Eichens
PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

None of us wants to subscribe to a polemic that assigns to objects or feelings a gender, and, in fact, “about eighty percent of flowers are hermaphrodites,” containing both male and female sex organs.^[23] Still, when I read the words of the German mystic poet Novalis — “Should plants perhaps be the products of the feminine nature and a masculine spirit,” he asks. “And plants, say, the young girls — animals the young boys of nature?”^[24] — I feel some truth in them beyond the obvious and stereotypic dualities of gentleness and brute force, beauty and the beast. When I was writing my second book of poetry, wherein each poem grew out of a concentrated meditation on an individual herb, weed, or flower growing in a circumference around my home in Montana, I thought I was compiling a personalized, albeit poetic, herbal. Like an herbal, many of the poems contained the history of the plants’ origins and uses, as well as my own close observations. But as I wrote more and more of them, instead of my perhaps misguided intention to listen to the plant and hear what it might have to tell me of its life, they seemed rather to reveal a wisdom applicable to my own wounds — physical and emotional — as well as the spiritual and epistemological wounds of a larger world that has not only separated itself from nature but also from what I will call the feminine. In “Bluebell,” I wrote:

The poems began to reflect a sensibility, even theology, particularly in accord with the concerns of women, with their emphasis on cycles of birth and death, illness and health, childhood and aging, in other words, to the processes of the body:

or, in “Prairie Sage”:

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, whose recent poems have also been an attempt to communicate with plants, animals, and insects, says of her method, in an interview with Lesley Scalapino, “In reality, it is difficult for me to tune into the thoughts of animals and insects. It takes time for me to become quiet and the animals are moving around. I could often receive ‘instant messages,’ but what I sent out myself tended to be pressured, and I don’t think that is the best way for animals to take in meaning… A plant gives me more time to get to know it.”^[25]