“The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.”
–Jean Giraudoux
If you have a thriving garden, there’s an orgy in your backyard.
Flowers are the sex organs of most plants* and their perfume may be what first brings the revelers. Many flowers—from trees, shrubs, annuals (the plants that grow, flower, and die all in one year), perennials (plants that stick around for years), bulbs (like tulips), tubers (dahlias), rhizomes (irises)—beckon pollinators with their enticing scents. Then there’s the gorgeous hues, the attention grabbers that also say, “Come do me.” The pollinators, in a hungry, one might say even lusty, frame of mind buzz and flutter from plant to plant. They sip, and rub, and gather, and frolic around in the luxuriousness of the silken flowers, drinking the nectar, gathering pollen.
Pollen, by the way, is plant sperm.
The pollinators are drunk and happy sipping that plant-wine. The plant’s very excited because it’s getting, well, . . . laid.
The pollen moves from one flower to another as the bees and other pollinators, such as wasps, flies, butterflies, moths, ants, and sometimes even humans, move around participating in the orgy. The goal for the flower, who have put on this party, is for the pollen grains to attach to the lady part of the flower. The top of this part is called a stigma. The pollen travels down the tube and fertilizes the female “eggs” in the ovule (think womb). Of course there are many variations of sexual intercourse in the plant world, so this isn’t the only way it happens . . . but you get the idea.
If fertilization occurs, the seeds ripen in the ovary and eventually are borne onto the soil—again through many variations: there may be a spontaneous explosion of the seed case, or, in the case of dandelions, the wind might loosen and free them, or animals, birds, and insects may dine on the seeds and later deposit them. When seeds land on the sweet earth and the conditions are right they germinate, grow, reach maturity.
And the orgy invitations will go out again next season.
*The exceptions are mosses, ferns, and conifers.
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Sandra Knauf has worn many hats in her garden writing career—she’s been a “Colorado Voices” columnist for The Denver Post and her work has appeared nationally in publications that include GreenPrints and Mary Janes Farm; she’s shared her work locally here on USR and on Colorado Springs’s NPR affiliate radio station KRCC. In 2011, she started her own publishing company, Greenwoman Publishing, and has since published six issues of a literary garden writing journal (Greenwoman Volumes 1-6), a YA sci-fi fantasy novel (Zera and the Green Man), and an anthology of sexy gardening stories that she describes as a “feminist/gardener’s answer to Fifty Shades of Grey” (Fifty Shades of Green).
Her most recent endeavor is a bold, original, and often hilarious take on the gardening memoir. Please Don’t Piss on the Petunias: Raising Kids, Crops, and Critters in the City covers the time that Knauf went from a wide-eyed dreamer and new mother longing for a garden (in her late twenties) through learning everything she could about green living over the next two decades while at the same time adopting a lot of pets.
