Queer botany

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

I know this was touched on a few months ago in relation to an exhibition at Kew, and I didn't understand it then either. Recently we went to the National Trust Tudor property Sutton House in Homerton (well worth a visit, btw). The adjacent tiny parcel of land was donated to the NT on condition that this former scrapyard was turned into a garden, which was done a couple of years ago. Very nice it looks too. However, it is apparently an example of queer botany. Why? Can anyone explain this to me in extremely simple terms? Does it simply mean that some of the people involved in designing and planting it identify as queer and a few of the plants have assocation with gay icons? It surely isn't implying anything about sexual reproduction, is it?

https://www.queerbotany.com/projects/platinum-garden

You ever see some modern art and think “That’s a pile of rubbish.” Then next to it is a description saying, “Unicorn’s Unguent 2001 is a metaphysical interpretation of the solipsistic creative processes used by termites to evade capture, as seen from the perspective of a decommissioned android.”

Well, same.

I enjoyed the garden a lot. What I didn't understand was why it had the label 'queer' attached to it.

Lots of pansies?

I was looking at the Kew Gardens thread I've linked to above and there was this:

EmpressaurusOfCats · 24/10/2023 05:27
I had a marketing email about it from them yesterday, featuring their ‘Pansy Patrol.’ FFS. Queer & Pansy are homophobic insults. I might email back accusing them of using hateful language to a lesbian.

This came to mind, for some reason

superskim genius! 😂

is that available in an English translation?

To queer something you put the word queer in front of it.

Then that thing is queer.

Which is just the same as the original "non queer", but with the word queer in front of it.

So it becomes very very speshal. Because words that begin with Q are the most amazing words.

That is queer. Sorted. You are welcome

@RobinEllacotStrike Thankyou muchly, i find it all very queer TBH, oh gosh am i in with the in crowd.

@quixote9

But almost all the visible plants you see around you don't actually have a sex. They don't produce sex cells. They produce little tiny plants (pollen, for instance, is a little tiny plant) which then produce the actual egg and sperm which turn into the big plants you see.

Trying to get my head around this, I've googled "how plants reproduce" and found mentions of male gametes and female gametes and descriptions of male germ cells and female germ cells uniting to form a zygote.
Pollen grains come from the male part of the flower and they fertilise the female part of the flower.

Can you clarify or link to anything to educate me/us on this?

It seems to be saying that it's about how queer people like to garden.

Homosexual gardeners are nothing new of course, they're almost a kind of tradition, so it's all quite silly really.

I am sure though it's really about the money.

I spent several days this week trying to figure out how I could fit the program I want to do under one of the grants we have. Which made me feel a bit dirty but I can say I did not resort to queering it.

Strikes forehead of COURSE! I see it all now 😳

Who cares who the gardeners have sex with? It’s irrelevant.

Please don’t take offence but I’d go to
bbcbitesize gcse biology plant reproduction

Perhaps they need reminding that nature has a sex, she is called mother lol.
Not now she isn’t.

Getting properly botanical here, it's officially called alternation of generations. Sex cells are haploid (have half the usual number of chromosomes). Then when they combine, they form a diploid organism, like us, for instance. .......[this marks paragraph breaks!]...........In our case, that halving is done within the ovaries or testes of the diploid organism. ..........................In the case of plants, the reproductive generation is produced by the diploid adults. Technically, those are not the "male" parts of the plant. They're called staminate, because stamens (anthers) produce pollen which is a few tiny cells inside a beautiful tough species-specific structure that keeps its shape for millions of years. (Scientists study paleoecology by identifying ancient pollen grains. Check out some scanning electron micrographs. Anyway. side issue. You may gather I'm rather fascinated by plants 🤓) ...................... The pollen is the organism that produces sperm and has actual "male" cells, except you can't see them. The pistillate equivalent of pollen is only 8 cells in advanced plants, stays entirely within the diploid plant and produces an egg cell. ..........................In primitive plants, eg mosses, the sperm and egg-producing phases are visible plants in their own right. (Most of what you see of a moss is the haploid, sex cell producing phase. Those combine to produce a diploid "adult" which is the spore-producing 'periscope' you see growing from the leafy part of the moss.) .............................Probably all too much information, and don't know if it clarifies anything. Hope so!

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g "I looked at the home page of Queer Botany. There were words there. They didn't seem to work together to impart meaning in the way that I'm used to seeing."
I don't speak French, so I have to take her word for it, but Camille Paglia (in either Sexual Personae or Sex, Art and American Culture ... I can't remember which) argues that much of Derrida's writing is an elabourate joke in which he writes paragraphs made up of gramatically, formally correct sentences that lack semantic content. Trying to be funny but also trying to show the difference between signigified and signifier, or maybe all the things that language does apart from conveying meaning.

It works in French, but not in English. So (according to Paglia) lots of academics in the anglosphere spent the 70s and 80s poring over his works in translation, attributing various meanins to paragraphs of text that have no meaning.

Mmmmmmm quixote9, you had me at haploid 😍
Loved your post, thank you, and your enthusiasm for plants and technical terms

@quixote9
Thank you for that. I've got the visual dictionary out to reread your explanation and see which bits are which.

As an enthusiastically homo gardener I have designed and planted a couple of gardens for myself as a bit of an inside joke. Purely for self amusement. While I had a colour scheme and style in mind I did deliberately source plants whose names have associations with WLW gardeners; so Rosa Constance Spry, Queen of Sweden, Peonia Sarah Bernhardt, Geranium Brookside you get the picture. Some signifiers are more obscure eg in the Victorian period violets were worn as a indicator of lesbianism. The latest funny one I need to grow is the butterfly peaflower which makes bright violet teas and its Latin name is Clitoria ternatea -named for very obvious reasons when you see it in flower. I have always labelled the varieties in situ as I am forgetful.

I also have an auricula theatre named Spring Awakening which has auriculas with fun names like Yellow Muff, Tomboy, Jilting Jessie and Gay Crusader. Am I in any way seriously queering the garden? Don’t think so as I can’t stand all that theoretical nonsense but am I having a gay old time amongst my coterie of laydee flower associations? You bet.

I love the thought that's gone into that, woolly!

My understanding of queer theory suggests a genuinely 'queered' garden would consist of slug pellets, weedkiller, concrete and plastic ivy trained over a collapsed lattice, with randomly dug holes, and perhaps a video screen projecting badly drawn animations of minecraft crops that glitches at intervals. Maybe some button mushrooms sourced from Waitrose scattered over the lot.

Oh @woollyhatter that is wonderful!
Do you have photographs of your gardens?

If there's a haploid and a diploid is there a ploid?

Also @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g one of the latest wheezes is putting text into an AI and getting it to parse it for you.

Love this!