On Being Pollinated: Keats’s Forget-Me-Not
LINNAEUS HAD HOPED TO MAKE his system of classifying plants according to their sexual organs more accessible by calling the stamens, the male parts, ‘husbands’, and the female stigmas ‘wives’ or ‘brides’. So the Enneandria were described as ‘Nine men in the same bride’s chamber, with one woman’ and Adonis as a mass orgy, with a hundred of each sex. Far from helping to convey his message, the vision of a kingdom of sexualised and, worse, licentious vegetables was too much for eighteenth-century sensibilities. The Encyclopaedia Britannica castigated Linnaeus: ‘A man would not naturally expect to meet with disgusting strokes of obscenity in a system of botany.’ The Revd Richard Polwhele agreed. His ‘The Unsex’d Females’ was a verse parody of Darwin, in which he lashed out equally at libertine vegetables and liberated women. He had particular venom for Mary Wollstonecraft, self-educated author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and a woman widely vilified for her affairs, figuring her as Collinsonia – ‘two husbands in bed with one wife’ – and enjoying a life of ‘botanic bliss’.
It’s uncertain whether any of the Romantics knew the full extent of plants’ exchanges with insects, and what we now understand to be sexual congress by proxy. They were obviously aware that the two orders kept close company, and found the flower’s gift of nectar to the bee richly metaphorical, analogous to their offerings of sweet scent and remembrance to humans. The pinpointed beauty of the forget-me-not (in Linnaeus’s system the flowers are typified as having five men in bed with four wives), the compelling fixity of its ‘eye’, the little yellow ring at the centre of the corolla, made it a particular favourite. Coleridge composed his poem ‘The Keepsake’ around it in 1802, recalling his love-at-first-sight meeting with the lively redhead Sara Hutchinson (the elder sister of Wordsworth’s wife Mary) three years before:
Nor can I find, amid my lonely walk
By rivulet, or spring, or wet roadside,
That blue and bright-eyed floweret of the brook,
Hope’s gentle gem, the sweet Forget-me-not!
In the second verse he fantasises a marriage with Sara (respectably disguised under the name of Emmeline), and her stitching on a silk sampler ‘Between the Moss-rose and Forget-me-not –/ Her own dear name, with her own auburn hair!’ The name forget-me-not hadn’t become current in Britain yet, and Coleridge felt obliged to add a slightly pedantic gloss: ‘One of the names (and meriting to be the only one) of the Myosotis Scorpioides palustris [water forget-me-not] a flower from six to twelve inches high, with blue blossom and bright yellow eye. It has the same name over the whole of Germany (Vergissmein nicht) and, I believe, in Denmark and Sweden.’
Keats wrote about the forget-me-not in 1818, also mentioning its eye. He’d been swapping verses with his close friend and fellow poet John Reynolds about, amongst other things, the allure of eye colour and the potency of the colour blue. Blue – primary, primordial, reflected by sky and sea long before the greens of life emerged – was seen as the most transcendental of colours by the Romantics. John Ruskin pronounced, ‘The blue colour is everlastingly appointed by the Deity to be a source of delight.’ (Modern social surveys suggest he was right, and that blue is a strong candidate for the ‘most favourite’ colour.) Reynolds had written a sonnet to Keats called ‘Sweet Poets of the Antique Line’ which ends ‘Dark eyes are dearer far/Than those that mock the hyacinthine bell’. Keats responded with a sonnet subtitled ‘The Answer …’, a hymn to the colour of the hyacinthine bell. After rhapsodising on the blues of sky and water, he ends:
Blue! – gentle cousin of the forest green,
Married to green in all the sweetest flowers –
Forget-me-not, – the blue-bell, – and, that queen
Of secrecy, the violet: what strange powers
Hast thou, as a mere shadow! But how great,
When in an eye thou art alive with fate!
Keats obviously means blue in human eyes in the last two lines. The curious thing is that they would make equal sense if he were referring to the power of blue in the flowers’ ‘eyes’. Thirty years previously two German botanists, Joseph Kölreuter and Christian Sprengel, had worked with forget-me-nots to unravel the seductive cues by which flowers attracted insects to fulfil their vegetal destinies. Had Keats heard the buzz?
Some sort of productive association between insects and flowers had been intuited as far back as the Greeks. The Romans certainly understood the sexual nature of the pollination of date palms. Theophrastus (circa 300 BC) talked of the need to bring the male flower to the female, to ensure successful fruiting. But until the nineteenth century self-pollination was commonly assumed to be the universal means by which plants propagated themselves, and the role of nectar in this process was often comically misinterpreted. One eighteenth-century theory saw it as a kind of food for the plant, which might ‘conveniently serve the same purpose as white of egg’, nourishing the seeds, and helping to ‘make them keep and preserve their vegetable quality longer’. The ever-imaginative Erasmus Darwin thought that flowers fed on their own nectar in order to mature, so that they could ‘become sensible to the passion, and gain the apparatus for the reproduction of their own species’. From here it was a short step to the conceit that the first insects had developed from anthers which had ‘by some means loosened themselves from their parent plant, like the male flowers of Vallisneria [tape grass]; and that many other insects in process of time had been formed from these’.
Philip Miller, a Londoner like Keats, and Director of the Chelsea Physic Garden, made the first clear notes on insect pollination, which were written up by his friend Patrick Blair in 1721:
[He] experimented with twelve Tulips, which he set by themselves about six or seven Yards from any other, and as soon as they glew, he took out the Stamina so very carefully, that he scattered none of the Dust, and about two days afterwards, he saw bees working on Tulips, in a bed where he did not take out the Stamina, and when they came out, they were loaded with Dust on their Bodies and Legs. He saw them fly into the Tulips, where he had taken out the Stamina, and when they came out, he went and found they had left behind them sufficient to impregnate these Flowers, for they bore good ripe Seed: which persuades him that the Farina may be carried from place to place by Insects …
Miller’s insights made little impact at first, but in 1750 Arthur Dobbs (of tipitiwitchet fame) made close observations of the flowers visited by bees in a hayfield, and examined the pollen loads carried back to the hive:
Now if the Bee is appointed by Providence to go only, at each Loading, to Flowers of the same Species, as the abundant Farina often covers the whole Bee, as well as what it loads upon its Legs, it carries the Farina from Flower to Flower, and by its walking upon the Pistillum and Agitation of its Wings, it contributes greatly to the Farina’s entering into the Pistillum and at the same time prevents the heterogeneous Mixture of the Farina of different Flowers with it; which, if it stray’d from flower to flower at random, it would carry to Flowers of a different Species.
This concentration on similar blooms, commonly known as ‘species constancy’, is a matter of convenience rather than instinct for many nonspecialised feeders. Even bees can be promiscuous feeders when opportunity arises, as a few minutes spent watching individuals in a mixed flower bed will demonstrate. But Dobbs had provided confirmation of Miller’s broad ideas about the role of insects in pollination. The full and complex mechanisms of the nectar-for-sexual-services transactions were finally unravelled by Kölreuter and Sprengel in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Kölreuter established that nectar both attracts bees to flowers and is their high-energy fuel. (Pollen is used chiefly as a long-term food for the developing larvae.) Sprengel worked out the logistics of the harvest. In 1787, wondering what might be the purpose of the hairs on the base of the petals of blue wood cranesbill, he reckoned that since nectar was necessary to attract, and feed, pollinators, the hairs were a gauzy shower cap, serving to protect it from being spoilt by rain. The next year he studied forget-me-nots in depth, and recognised that the yellow ring (the iris of the flower’s ‘eye’) acted as a honey guide, leading the visiting insects to the short tube at the centre of the sky-blue flower, and so to the nectar at its base. And, incidentally, to the pollen en route. Over the following years he distinguished four crucial components of the forget-me-not’s floral structure: the nectary itself, which secretes the sugary juice; the nectar reservoir; the nectar cover, which protects it from rain; and the various devices which enable insects to locate the nectar – especially ‘bee-line’ markings and scent.
Forget-me-nots are pollinated chiefly by flies, including bee flies, whose appealing hovery flights in March are one of the most reliable signs of a warm spell. Experiments involving scent masking and fake flowers of different colours have shown that bee flies respond chiefly to scent, and secondly to blue coloration. Butterflies also occasionally visit forget-me-nots, and different species are highly individual in the senses they use to locate the nectar: small tortoiseshells don’t respond to scent, but do to both the flower’s yellow eye and its blue petals; peacocks are attracted by the scent and by blue and yellow; brimstones and other white family butterflies respond to the blue petals alone. Blue, and its shadings off into purple and ultraviolet, appears to be the ‘favourite’ colour in the insect world, too. Yellow is second, and is the partner of blue in greens. No insect has yet been found to have a receptor for red in its eyes, and colours at this end of the spectrum appear black or dark grey to them.
By the mid eighteenth century an understanding of co-evolution was emerging, a realisation that small changes in a flower’s architecture or signalling abilities encouraged comparable adaptation in the insects that used it. Both parties benefited. The modified insect could continue to gather nectar, and the flower to have its pollen carried to other individuals, ensuring a constantly shifting and resilient genetic base. The transport of pollen probably developed as a spin-off from insects eating primitive self-pollinating flowers. But floral diversity, as we understand it, evolved chiefly as a result of the mutually beneficial relations of these two classes of organism.
Did Keats suspect any of this back in the early years of the eighteenth century, and if so how would it have sat with his apparent hostility to reductionist science? He’d been a florophile since he was a boy in the villages that made up eastern London. He’d foraged in open fields around Edmonton, watching birds, climbing elms and gathering nettle leaves to hide in his brothers’ beds. His medical notebooks from ten years later are decorated with small sketches of flowers, including the pages devoted to Astley Cooper’s lecture on the structure of the human nose. His poems are as full of floral decoration as the interiors of Gothic churches. His last letter, written just before he died on 23 February 1821, aged just twenty-five, has a final flourish: ‘O! I can feel the cold earth upon me – the daisies growing over me – O for this quiet.’
Three years earlier he found in the reality of the flower a perfect model for his idea of ‘Negative Capability’ – a kind of creative suspension of certainty, an attentive indolence, the ‘wise passiveness’ advocated by Wordsworth. One beautiful spring morning in late February he sat in his rooms in Hampstead and wrote a cheering letter to John Reynolds, then passive from chronic illness, not philosophical choice.
It has been an old Comparison for our urging on – the Bee Hive – however it seems to me that we should rather be the flower than the Bee – for it is a false notion that more is gained by receiving than giving – no, the receiver and the giver are equal in their benefits. The flower I doubt not, receives a fair guerdon from the Bee – its leaves blush deeper in the next spring – and who shall say between Man and Woman who is the most delighted? Now it is more noble to sit like Jove than to fly like Mercury – let us not therefore go hurrying about and collecting honey bee-like, buzzing here and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is to be arrived at; but let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive – budding patiently under the eye of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favours us with a visit – sap will be given us for Meat and dew for Drink.
I was rather taken, on first reading, with Keats’s chirpy but subtly subversive praise of the flower – or at least of laid-back flower power as a model for living: he was giving his sick friend a pick-me-up, a get-well note, not an ecology lesson. But I find it hard to credit that his allegory of human creativity and reciprocal relationships isn’t based on the mutuality of pollination, and suspect Keats was aware that more was going on between flower and bee than an exchange of nectar and a debate about utilitarian values. There are innuendos of sex and intimations of ecology in his talk of ‘budding’, and flowers ‘taking hints’ from insects, and in the notion of the flower receiving ‘a fair guerdon’ (a reward) in return for its nectar, something which effects its future growth. Keats had read broadly in science for his medical studies. His suggestion that males and females might have equal ‘delight’ in congress was as scientifically precocious as it was socially progressive, and hints that he may have been aware of contemporary notions of insect pollination, which allowed flowers to have, as it were, sexual intercourse by proxy.
But Keats’s views on science remained ambivalent. Would the knowledge that flowers had a function, beyond providing metaphors for lotus eating and creative passivity, put him on the side of Wordsworth’s dictum in ‘The Tables Turned’: ‘Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;/Our meddling intellect/Misshapes the beauteous forms of things:–/We murder to dissect’? Keats had, with reluctance, done his own dissection at medical school, and had notes on the surgeon John Hunter’s physical unweaving of the electric eel in his attempt to discover the source of its vital spark. Yet in some very well-known lines from his long poem ‘Lamia’ (1820) he repeats his attack on Newton’s dissection of the rainbow:
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine –
Unweave a rainbow …
‘Lamia’ is a complicated narrative poem, in which a terrifying serpent, or rather an extraordinary snake-like chimera – ‘Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue;/Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard’ – is transformed into a woman, and then falls to her true serpent form again when challenged by the fierce gaze of the rational philosopher Apollonius. Keats’s reference to reason’s power to ‘Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,/Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine’ is deliberately equivocal. ‘Cold philosophy’ could be protective as well as disenchanting, liberating us from the dark powers of unreason.
Within fifty years science would begin to undermine Keats’s pleasant conceit of the gently passive and receptive nature of flowers. Since Charles Darwin’s unravelling of the pollination procedures of primroses and orchids, flowers have been shown to be as potentially busy and impatient as bees. Indeed, they could be said to make the first move in most flower–insect relationships – firing smell pulses, electrostatic charges, reflecting sound waves to tempt pollinators towards them, then imprisoning them with fantastic arrangements of trapdoors, one-way tunnels and chemical handcuffs. Insects, for their part, have been shown to have developed discrimination and a kind of instinctive patience in their choice of nectar partners. I think Keats might have enjoyed the deeper layers of reciprocity now known to exist between flower and bee, and that choices (however circumscribed) are being made by the insect. Modern writers such as David Rothenberg and Michael Pollan have suggested that there are analogies with our aesthetic sense in this process: we too are drawn to flowers whose appearance gives us some kind of affective reward. Pollan isn’t quite right in saying that the flower acts as a metaphor to the insect; but it is a signifier, a dazzling multi-sensorial advertisement for what lies hidden beneath.
For us, flowers are both metaphors and signifiers. The eye of Myosotis says ‘forget-me-not’ and bee fly, lover and poet obey. And the Romantic imagination, inspirited by nature, pays it back in a fair guerdon of art.
The last of the nineteenth-century Romantics, John Ruskin, was appalled by any suggestion that the ‘beauty’ of flowers existed chiefly to delight insects and assist plant reproduction. He had written with enormous understanding about the elegant forms and delicate engineering of leaves but was repelled by the idea that they were built just so for the business of photosynthesis. This is a beautiful and magical process to most modern minds, but to Ruskin it was offensive, reducing leaves to the status of ‘gasometers’. Similarly, his sensuous and evocative descriptions of flowers, which have no equal in nineteenth-century prose, ran in parallel with a belief that they existed purely for the edification of the human soul: ‘The perception of beauty,’ he wrote in Proserpina: the Studies of Wayside Flowers, ‘and the power of defining physical character, are based on moral instinct.’ Ruskin didn’t deny that the forms of plants could be functional, but denied that ‘beauty’ could be an objective measure of the grace and elegance with which they existed on their own terms, and inside their own living communities. He believed it could only ever be a value judgement by humans with the divinely endowed gift of seeing moral purpose and design in nature. Which is why he took the unconventional view that the flower, not the seed, was the ultimate achievement, the final purpose of a plant’s life:
[T]hese are the real significances of the flower itself … It is the utmost purification of the plant and the utmost disciple. Where its tissue is blanched fairest, dyed purest, set in strictest rank, appointed to most chosen office, there – and created by the fact of this purity and function – is the flower. But created, observe, by the purity and order, more than by the function. The flower exists for its own sake, not for the fruit’s sake. The production of the fruit is an added honour to it – it is a granted consolation to us for its death. But the flower is the end of the seed, – not the seed of the flower … It is because of its beauty that its continuance is worth Heaven’s while.
Ruskin died in 1900. Had he lived for another quarter of a century he would have been able to confront a considerable challenge to his aesthetic theory: an orchid which flowered entirely underground and out of sight. In 1928 a Western Australian called Jack Trott noticed an odd crack that had appeared in his flower bed, and a sweet scent percolating from it. He scraped away a few inches of soil and found a small, pale pink efflorescence buried underneath. It proved to be an entirely new species, later named Rhizanthella gardneri, the only member of the orchid tribe to live out its entire existence underground. Not able to receive any energy from the sun, it has a symbiotic relationship (via a mycorrhizal fungus) with the evergreen broom honeymyrtle, or broombush, Melaleuca uncinata. Its blooms are small, about an inch across, but perfectly and strangely formed. The pale sepals enclose up to ninety tiny, dark maroon orchid flowers, like caviar in a cup. They are pollinated by underground insects such as termites, presumably attracted by their sweet smell. The whole flowering apparatus’s visual beauty is irrelevant and unwitnessed (except, presumably, by God), and only Ruskin himself could pronounce on whether this disqualifies it from the purity of flowerhood altogether or makes it a sublime example of floral beauty existing for its own sake.