5 Vegetable Love: Desire, Feeling, and Sexuality in Botanical Fiction T. S. Miller ‘Forded several Plashes where fourished lascivious Shrubs.’ — John Fryer, A New Account of East-India and Persia, 1698 1 Pre-modern botany, guided by the overriding Aristotelian doctrine of the tripartite soul, insisted on the subordination of vegetal life to other forms of being, positioning plants as in possession of only the most basic of vital forces, encompassing growth and reproduction. Even so, according to this proto-scientifc Aristotelian system, plants, animals and humans continue to share that faculty of being which in humans expresses itself as sex and sexuality in all their complexity. Crucially, classical and medieval thought denied plants any capacity for sensa- tion, feeling and emotion: in fact, the Middle English word ‘feling’ is one of the words most frequently used as the technical term for that capacity which plants lack in contradistinction even to animals. For instance, John Trevisa, in translating the encyclopaedic text known as the De proprietatibus rerum, writes that plants grow and reproduce but without ‘feling’: ‘In trees is soule of lif […]; but þerinne is no soule of feelynge. And so it feeliþ no sore whan it is yhewe other ykutte, nouþer slepeþ nouþer breþeþ inward nouþer outward, noþer haþ oþere con- diciouns þat longeþ to þe soule of felynge’. 2 In other words, Trevisa’s plants drink without thirst, grow without perception, exist without sensation. At the same time, medieval texts such as the bestiary and the herbal insist upon the role that plants can play in engendering emotions in other beings, particularly those related to sex and repro- duction. For instance, in several medieval accounts the mandrake plant transgressed the Aristotelian hierarchy of being – said to resemble the human form with two distinct genders and to scream in pain upon being pulled from the ground – and Mandragora was not simply a creature of