Flora Unveiled

Professor Jules Janick, Chronica Botanica Flora Unveiled: The Discovery and Denial of Sex in Plants is a tour de force written by the eminent plant physiologist Lincoln Taiz and his wife Lee, a biologist. It is destined to be a classic.

Ann Shteir, York University When botanist Linnaeus wrote in 18th-century Europe about "brides" and "bridegrooms" and sexual practices in the marriage beds of the Vegetable Kingdom, he joined cultural conversations about women, men, and plants that had been going on for centuries. This fascinating and very welcome book by two plant biologists offers historical perspectives on ideas about plant reproduction, especially disputes between "sexualists" and "asexualists." Based in energetic research and richly illustrated, it melds the history of science with current gender studies about cultural factors that shape scientific ideas. Lincoln Taiz and Lee Taiz track associations dating back to Mesopotamian vegetation goddesses and forward into Romantic writings between women, flowers, fertility, sexuality, and qualities gendered "feminine," especially what the authors term "the plants-as-female gender bias."

Peter H. Raven, President Emeritus, Missouri Botanical Garden This book presents an impressive, highly readable, and beautifully illustrated panorama of the way that our understanding of sex, and ultimately sex in plants, expanded from the Stone Age to the 19th century. In the scholarly hands of Lincoln and Lee Taiz, the puzzle of plant reproduction gives us a fascinating mirror into human thought as it has grown in complexity through the ages. A masterpiece of exposition that will sturdily stand with the passage of time.

Karen Reeds, author of Come into A New World: Linnaeus and America What are flowers for? With gusto and deep learning, Flora Unveiled explains why humanity took millennia to figure out that plants have sex -- and why that great discovery met with disbelief and disgust. A classic of scientific and cultural exposition, with surprises on every page!

Michael Marder, author of The Philosopher's Plant (2014) and, with Luce Irigaray, Through Vegetal Being (2016) This is a magnificent book, both erudite and engaging. Never losing their guiding thread of vegetal sexuality, Lincoln and Lee Taiz successfully cross-pollinate the specimens of knowledge that grow on the fields of plant science, philosophy, religious studies, and aesthetics. Flora Unveiled is better than a revelation; it is the event of truth (Heidegger's un-concealment) blossoming in the ever-metamorphosing shape of a plant.

Nigel Chaffey, AoBBlog Flora Unveiled is not only a scholarly work of great erudition, it is a true labour of love, and deserves to be read by all (not just the plant-minded). The authors are to be congratulated in giving us such an accomplished botanical detective story.

Lincoln Taiz completed his doctoral and postdoctoral research at U.C. Berkeley, and after joined the faculty at UC Santa Cruz. Dr. Taiz has published numerous research articles on a wide range of topics in plant physiology, and is the co-author of the standard textbook in the field, Plant Physiology and Development, now in its sixth edition. Since 2007 he has been a Fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists.Lee Taiz spent many years as a research biologist at UC Santa Cruz and is now a fulltime freelance artist.

Preface Chapter 1: The Quandary Over Plant Sex Chapter 2: The Discovery of Sex Chapter 3: Crop Domestication and Gender Chapter 4: Plant-Female Iconography in Neolithic Europe Chapter 5: Sacred Trees and Enclosed Gardens Chapter 6: Mystic Plants and Aegean Nature Goddesses Chapter 7: The "Plantheon" of Greek Mythology Chapter 8: Plant Sex from Empedocles to Theophrastus Chapter 9: Roman Assimilation of Greek Myths and Botany Chapter 10: From Herbals to Walled Gardens: Plant Gender and Iconography Chapter 11: Troubadours, Romancing the Rose, and the Rebirth of Naturalism Chapter 12: The Difficult Birth of the Two-Sex Model Chapter 13: Plant Nuptials in the Linnaean Era Chapter 14: Behind the Green Door: Love and Lust in Eighteenth Century Botany Chapter 15: Wars of the Roses: Ideology versus Experiment Chapter 16: Idealism and Asexualism in the Age of Goethe Chapter 17: Sex and the Single Cryptogam Chapter 18: Flora's Enclosed Gardens