Leah Zani is an author and public anthropologist.
My father planted a small vegetable garden in our side yard when I was about seven. Corn, carrots, potatoes, green beans and I think perhaps also tomatoes — but those are difficult to grow in places awash in fog and I have no memory of their red flush.
My father was a careful gardener. Gloves, trowel, straw hat, work boots, a patched plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, her long red hair in a ponytail. She had the appearance of a gentleman farmer, diligent but scholarly; she planted precisely, using a plum line tied between two stakes and a ruler to measure spacing and depth.
The garden fascinated me. My father told me to stay out of it if she wasn’t there. But I would sneak out there while she was at work.
At first, I stood and trembled in the presence of the closed corn husks, wrapped tight as chrysalises on stalks only a little taller than myself and the buried potatoes that I imagined growing to fantastic sizes underground. How did this happen, I wondered — how did the world grow? I remember holding myself still so I might sense and participate in the life around the yard. I was especially taken with fruits and vegetables — the plants that we would feed and then would feed us.
It was in my nature even then to try to examine what is hidden. I had very little patience as a child and could not stop myself from peeling open every tiny, swaddled corn to look at the green and wrinkled kernels on cobs as thin as pencils. I noticed the overlapping leaves of each husk, edges nearly translucent, the leaves soft and moist like the skin between my fingers. I peeked at each one and then slowly restrung the silk and rewrapped the husks. Every corn later died because of my loving inquisition. I did not have nature’s grace.
I turned my attention to the potatoes. I dug down to tap the smooth tops of each of them. I examined their warped rhizomic shapes and tugged on the umbilicals that connected them to the mother root. Those roots felt like the veins under my own skin. I scratched them to see what color they were beneath the dirt. Pale green, even a bit of blue, sometimes beige-yellow or white like wheat dough. I fell in love with the starchy, paper-like musk of potatoes. Then I scooped the soil back over.
I pulled up all the carrots, comparing their lengths. And I unzipped the beans to look at the rows of tiny green fetuses inside. I thought I could push the carrots back into the soil, unaware that I had broken the fragile nets of roots in which they were suspended. I thought I could reseal the beans. I did this every day or so to check the progress of their vegetal growth.
I might hide behind a veil of childlike innocence, but the truth is that when I couldn’t close the first green bean, I still opened every other bean on the vine. Surely, I thought, everyone can be put back together; surely, surely, we are not all this fragile.
Back then, I believed that it was possible to study something without changing it. Even as a child, I was driven by an urge to measure and classify, instincts that became useful later in my anthropological career. I realize now that I was looking for my father in that failed garden. I was trying to understand her gender by studying the corn and the potatoes and the beans. I didn’t find her, but I did find something else.
“We are the inheritors of a beauty older than being human.”
In the Protestant Christian tradition that my father grew up in, Adam and Eve learn about sex from an apple.
This is an improbable lesson because nearly all the apples we consume are from trees that reproduce asexually. Apple trees in bloom have both male and female reproductive parts, and their flowers may exhibit several varieties of male-ness and female-ness along a spectrum of different stamens, stigmas, pigments and perfumes. They get help with pollination from other species like bumblebees and honeybees that scurry around their branches in a literal orgy of pollen. Not all apple flowers are sexually productive; some of them, apparently, just like fluffing the bumblebees.
After the fruit is ripe, apples again depend on other species — squirrels, mice, hedgehogs, rabbits, humans — to eat their fruits and disperse their seeds. The flowers and fruit are an enticement, an evolutionary lure, to the other partners in the trees’ reproduction systems.
Apples are unruly, sexually. A seed from a Red Delicious apple will not grow into a Red Delicious tree. They are just not that concerned about heredity. Their evolutionary strategy is to continually experiment with their identity. The apple may not fall far from the tree, but that tree is a magician, an artist, an innovator.
The first Red Delicious apple was found in an orchard in Iowa in 1872. My father lives in Iowa. Every Red Delicious apple that has ever been produced since then was grown on grafts from that original tree, whose branches now form an unimaginably vast network distributed around the globe. Every type of commercially sold apple has its origin tree, its proverbial tree from Eden. Nearly all commercially available apples are clones.
This is a very different reality from the strict monogamy, male heredity and heterosexual gender binary in the tale of Adam and Eve. The divide between genders is one of the foundations of Euro-American culture. In our culture, the genders are understood as binary opposites: If men are strong, then women are weak; if women are emotional, men are rational. Men are bees, women flowers. But the real bees and flowers do not play by the same rules. Nature is far more fluid.
Not all human cultures do, either. I studied for a time in Laos, a very ethnically diverse country: Ethnic Lao do not have gendered clothing, gendered body norms, gendered pronouns or gendered names, though these things were introduced by French colonialists in the 19th century. Men and women mostly dress and talk and work the same. This is because Lao genders are a pair, rather than a binary; there are still two genders, male and female, but they are more similar than they are different. Like a pair of shoes or a pair of mittens — each half shares more in common with its other half and the two are defined by their similarities rather than differences. If men are strong, then so are women.
Cultural practices shape bodies as surely as genetics do. When I lived in Laos, I had a colleague who often came to work wearing makeup. Some days he wore jewelry, some days he didn’t. No one in the office cared. This colleague had a gender-neutral name and, because the Lao language doesn’t have gendered pronouns, never had to choose between male and female identifiers. (In English, he chose male pronouns.) While there are many different ways of being gender-fluid in Laos, there isn’t a strict idea of “passing” or “transitioning” in the same way that my father transitioned.
Neither of these ways of experiencing gender is more correct than the other, and both express the wider possibilities of being human. Sex and gender are not fixed points separated by an uncrossable valley. They are moving vistas that change depending on where you stand and in which direction you travel. The way most people in Euro-American culture think of sex and gender is one perspective, the view from one vista. It is not the only one.
“Desire offers an alternative intelligence in nature, a nature shaped by creativity and attraction, an old and impulsive beauty that isn’t categorizable.”
A few years ago, I moved into my first house with a garden and began reading seed catalogs and garden guides. This was my second encounter with gardening after that disastrous first attempt.
I was by then familiar with fruits and vegetables but wholly unprepared for their sexual diversity. Asparagus, for example, grows in separate male and female plants. So if I wanted to harvest asparagus, I’d need at least two plants. Very few vegetables in the catalog grow like that. Most are like green beans: a mix of self-pollinating flowers that contain both male and female parts. In botany, these are known as “perfect flowers.”
The section on cucumbers listed types that are either gynoecious, monoecious, hermaphrodite or parthenocarpic, all words that I had to look up in the context of vegetables. Cucumber plants, it turned out, are neither fully male nor female but a shifting kaleidoscope that changes with environmental conditions. Gynoecious cucumbers have nearly all female flowers, while monoecious cucumbers have both male and female flowers on the same plant. A monoecious plant, such as the popular Armenian cucumber, will tend to produce more male flowers when it is young, then transition to a mostly female plant as it ages.
Sunlight is another common reproductive switch for cucumbers, their sex literally changing with the weather. Patches of cucumbers will sense each other and their environment to determine how many of them should produce male and female flowers. For example, the higher the density of plants, the more male flowers, since male flowers cost less for the plants to produce when nutrients must be shared. This strategy also reduces reproduction, ensuring there are never more seedlings than the patch can sustain. A cucumber patch thus self-regulates by managing the sexual expression of every plant. To me, that looks a lot like family planning.
Hermaphrodite cucumbers, meanwhile, contain both male and female parts within the same flower. Parthenocarpic cucumbers, such as lemon cucumber varieties, are all-female plants that can produce fruit without the help of a male plant. Environmental conditions trigger hormones, causing them to fruit asexually. Sex is purely optional for the lemon cucumber. Seeds are a product of reproduction, and since these plants tend to reproduce without sex, lemon cucumbers are often seedless.
Parthenocarpy was the reproductive strategy that was most unfamiliar to me, but flipping through the pages, I saw that many common fruits and vegetables are parthenocarpic: bananas, grapes, tomatoes, watermelons, squashes. Making matters even more complicated, some plants can be both parthenocarpic and monoecious depending on their growth conditions. Very few plants are only ever one thing or another.
“We create lesser orders to house all the beings that aren’t deemed human or human enough. We call it science as if it is neutral, but its function is often hierarchical.”
When Dad planted green beans, did she think about their ability to be male and female at the same time?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great poet-scientist, was among the first to rigorously study the metamorphosis of plants — the “infinite freedom of the growing leaf” to become a flower or an apple or a cucumber. After carefully observing plants from seed to senescence, he came to the daring conclusion that the diversity of vegetable forms is an expression of an inner metamorphic essence. Subsequent scientific studies would confirm Goethe’s observations. Every part of a plant can become any other part of a plant under the right conditions, and these transformations are the true motor of plant life, not sexual reproduction. That’s why a cucumber can bloom male one season and female the next. We may focus on flowers, fruits and vegetables, but from the plant’s perspective, growth and reproduction are the same thing.
In Goethe’s garden, the only discernible difference between growth and reproduction was that growth occurred slowly and reproduction all at once. “The organ that expanded on the stem as a leaf, assuming a variety of forms, is the same organ that now contracts in the calyx, expands again in the petal, contracts in the reproductive apparatus, only to expand finally as the fruit.” The body of a plant is in a state of fluid change nearly all the time. What looks to us like settled forms are actually phases in a longer process of change that continues before and after any human intervention.
Take the “proliferous carnation,” as Goethe called the flower. I grew them in my own small garden, and they were my grandmother’s favorite. Even the most perfect carnation flower might unexpectedly grow several new flowers at its base or sprout fresh stalks from among its petals that, in turn, produce their own leaves and flowers. Seed receptacles sometimes grow back into leaves or leaves into petals. Every part of the carnation can transform into any other part, seemingly on a whim and sometimes all at once, to create weird chimeras of plant parts.
That ability to transform is proof of the plant’s vitality, and so “sex” is replaced by an infinitely expansive vital force. Referring to the gender binary, Goethe used the word “anastomosis,” a word familiar to anyone in the medical field, to describe the way that two things that appear to be separate may have hidden connections. For Goethe, that connecting force was evidence of the divine.
A seed catalog reveals the human effort to classify and control unruly nature — both the breadth of our agro-biological effort and the delirious, absurd complexity of a world that exceeds our current scientific apparatus. What if we were to be as unruly as the plants in our gardens? To tap into their vital metamorphic force?
In her book “Becoming Undone,” the feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz examined a little-known aspect of Charles Darwin’s original theory, an evolutionary process that he termed “sexual selection.” Natural selection is about survival and heredity, the dry reading of the genetic will after the funeral. Sexual selection is about the expression of traits (some genetic, but also behavioral and cultural) during the organism’s lifetime. “Natural selection regulates the operations of birth and death,” Grosz wrote, “while sexual selection regulates the operations of beauty, appeal, and attraction.”
This lesser-known evolutionary force shapes everything that happens between the genetic brackets of birth and death. Darwin called it “sexual” selection because it describes the displays commonly seen in courtship and explains the evolutionary development of the strange, excessive, extravagant and frequently nonfunctional traits that distinguish the sexes. More than this, it’s the process that differentiates individual members of a species from each other and each sex from every other sex. (Many species have more than two sexes.)
Darwin acknowledged that it is “in most cases scarcely impossible to distinguish between the effects of natural and sexual selection,” for there is no obvious distinction between what makes an organism attractive during its life and what is beneficial for future generations. Sexual selection enhances beauty and individuality while also binding individual organisms together with ties of desire. Crucially, this does not necessarily have anything to do with reproduction. Reproduction is not the point of beauty.
“Knowledge systems that label some forms of life and ways of living as more or less ‘normal’ ignore the complexity of being human and the diversity of all life. The wild exuberance of our planet exceeds any order we have so far conceived.”
Yet beauty is everywhere. Sexual selection is the provocateur of spectacle, the spice of life. It makes blossoms smell sweet and apples blush red. It’s the cock’s comb and the hummingbird’s whistle. It’s a cucumber with male and female flowers. Your favorite pair of heels. How you fall in love.
What if we were to view ourselves and other forms of life as products of beauty rather than survival? Reductionist sciences focus on natural selection, inheritance and genes as the essential elements of life, but it is the far more wily forces of attraction that govern all beings while they breathe. The sciences have tended to look at life from the gene’s point of view, but sexual selection can only be understood from the outlook of the organism itself. Of life itself.
The apple, the lemon cucumber, the carnation: Every organism has a vital impetus toward beauty and self-expression that is related to its genetic fitness but which cannot be reduced to it. To call the taste of an apple an “evolutionary strategy” is to miss most of the pleasure and fuss about apples. A Red Delicious is still delicious if it is forever cloned. More profoundly, beauty, as Darwin used the term, doesn’t limit itself to gene pools: The traits that attract organisms to each other also attract them to other plants and animals.
Darwin notes in “On the Origin of Species” that “a nearly similar taste for beautiful colors and for musical sounds runs through a large part of the animal kingdom,” speculating that this sense for beauty must have first developed in “the lower animals” before being passed on to “the mind of man.” We share this sense of beauty with plants as well when they paint their fruits in colors and smells. We are the inheritors of a beauty older than being human.
Our culture spends a lot of time thinking about natural selection — red in tooth and claw — but even a cursory glance at our world shows the power of beauty. Beauty offers an alternative intelligence in nature, a nature shaped by creativity and attraction, an old and impulsive desire that isn’t categorizable. The metamorphic force kept in a wild seed. The world that Grosz describes is one full of flowers, each beautiful and different, where choice becomes an imperative. In the apple branches, where there are more flowers than a bee could visit, the bee chooses the flowers that it likes best.
“Oh, sweet pea,” Dad said when she noticed my path of destruction. That was her name for me: sweet pea. “You can’t peek at the corn like that. They need to grow by themselves.”
“Ok Daddy,” I said. But I didn’t believe her. What could possibly grow without being touched, tended, prodded, seen? Wasn’t my attention a kind of love? Dad wasn’t mad at me but was concerned about her vegetables. I cared about them too. If only I had been more patient and less greedy for knowledge and control over the world.
My father was not yet ready to reveal her true self. At the end of the season, we harvested only a few meager potatoes. The carrots shriveled and the beans died on the vine because I had wanted to understand what was inside them. I was looking for a truth that wasn’t yet ready to be revealed. Dad would never again plant vegetables, but about a year after that garden, she began her public gender transition.
Science is not only about knowing things, naming and classifying. It’s also about the ethics of knowledge production itself. Darwin’s insight was to break down the barrier between humans and other forms of life, to open the door to fields of research unlimited by human exceptionalism. “If man had not been his own classifier,” Darwin wrote, “he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.” Yet, two centuries later, much of modern science still reinforces separate classes and orders of life, just as Adam, before the arrival of Eve, named each plant and animal in the garden. We create lesser orders to house all the beings that aren’t deemed human or human enough. We call it science as if it is neutral, but its function is often hierarchical.
“Sex and gender are not fixed points separated by an uncrossable valley. They are moving vistas that change depending on where you stand and in which direction you travel.”
As Grosz reminds us, challenging these classes of inferiority is central to struggles for gender equality, racial equality and environmental justice. Knowledge systems that label some forms of life and ways of living as more or less “normal” ignore the complexity of being human and the diversity of all life. The wild exuberance of our planet exceeds any order we have so far conceived.
Goethe attempted to come up with a name for the primordial organ of plant metamorphosis, but he found it impossible to scientifically identify what the carnation might have looked like before it was a carnation. He decided not to give it a name at all. Being a poet, this wasn’t his failure but a forbearance in the service of wisdom other than science.
Ours is not the only intelligence in the green: There are also the apples’ creative family of misfits, the cucumbers’ shifting community, the green beans’ intersexuality, the carnations’ metamorphosis. We can learn from the bee’s pleasure in choosing from a bounty of good options. The natural world — indeed, even just our gardens — is more diverse than the human societies within it, endlessly conceiving new models of sex, gender, family and ways to be.
