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Male Pleasure and the Genders of Eighteenth-Century Botanic Exchange: A Garden Tour
Thomas Hallock
| IN Winter 1764 cloth merchant and botanic middleman Peter Collinson retired to his principal delight, his garden in Mill Hill, outside London. The season was unusually warm and skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) was in bloom, which led him to write the friend who had procured that plant, Cadwallader Colden. The flowering of one specimen prompted a meditation on others, and on the many "Absent Friends" whom Collinson vicariously visited simply by strolling through his estate. His letter imagined a conversation: "See there my Honble Frd Governr Colden how thrifty they look—Sr I see nobody but Two fine Trees a Spruce & a Larch, thats True, but they are his representatives." Each plant stood for an individual. Bristly "long Leaved Pine" saplings served as "mementos of my Generous Frd" John Campbell, the late Duke of Argyll. The "Balm Gilead Firrs" renewed "concern" for Collinson's dearly departed Lord Petre, or Robert James, for "they came from his Nurserys." Mountain magnolia, rhododendron, and azaleas were "the Bounty of my Curious Botanic Friend" John Bartram. Two other magnolias, plus the "Loblolly Bay," the "Glory of my Garden," represented Thomas Lamboll of South Carolina.1 |
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This garden tour reflected a common sentiment in which plants served as a shorthand for intimate relationships that were transacted across vast space. Out of a remarkable epistolary network that neared two hundred correspondents, Collinson had actually met surprisingly few. He instead relied on letters that spoke a "Silent Language" to convey his "most intimate thoughts." The gift of a plant commonly prompted a letter of thanks and the specimen accordingly served as the conduit of masculine, same-sex feeling.2 Plant exchange also anchored heterosocial relationships, and elite women cultivated botanic networks of their own. Yet the exchange between men tapped into a deep reservoir of emotion that led to furious word weaving, often bordering on homoerotic, that left women at the margins. |
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Though Collinson saw Lamboll in the loblolly bay, Elizabeth (Thomas's wife) was the more avid gardener. When curious Bartram visited the Lambolls in 1760, he toured the grounds with Elizabeth "under the Intense Heat of a Mid Day Summer." In Charleston Bartram connected with a thriving network that also included Martha Daniell Logan, Mary Wood Wragg, Sarah Hopton, and Susannah Holmes Bee. The most famous of these women, Logan, published a "Gardener's Kalendar" (a guide to planting, fertilizing, harvesting, and care) that ran for decades in South Carolina almanacs. She and Bartram traded visits and Logan stocked his stove house with hyacinths and lilies. Such productive exchanges, however, became the subject of jest in letters to Collinson. Bartram bragged about the Charleston women whom he had "fascinated," and Collinson expressed mock longing for a "Mistress as Thou hath got who is always treating the[e] with Dainties." What turned genteel ladies into fascinated subjects? (The term fascinated was used to describe how rattlesnakes supposedly charmed their prey.) What made female peers into illicit lovers?3 |
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Attention to the history of sexuality in early America invites speculation about male pleasures in the garden. To date colonial eros has been an evasive topic. Contemporary categories rarely apply, and though letters reveal little about the sharing of physical sensation, they trafficked heavily in a language of same-sex feeling. Evidence in Europe, meanwhile, shows a clear trend in the institutionalization of heterosexuality, which accompanied the emergence of the effeminate sodomite, a third gender gathering at urban "molly houses" and increasingly the target of morality campaigns. Surely colonial cities with ties to Europe should yield the same evidence. But the record has been "profoundly silent." In a special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly ("Sexuality in Early America," January 2003), scholars offer some well-advised suggestions for clarifying terms and redirecting the search. Ruth H. Bloch notes: "To get at the stuff of sexual imagination, we need to work creatively from sources that are not explicitly sexual but are, in one way or another, about sex."4 |
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