The Intelligence of Flowers

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The Intelligence of Flowers
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
Translated and
with an Introduction by
Philip Mosley
State University of New York Press
2
cover photograph: Orchid No. 1, 2005, andrew sovjani
used by permission
Published by
state university of new york press
Albany

2008 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 18621949.
[Intelligence des eurs. English]
The intelligence of owers / Maurice Maeterlinck ;
translated and introduction by Philip Mosley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-7914-7273-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-7914-7274-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Botany. I. Mosley, Philip. II. Title.
PQ2625.A4I513 2008
844.8dc22
2007001782
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
vii
Introduction
ix
The Intelligence of Flowers
1
Scents
63
On the Publication History
of Maeterlincks Botanical Essays
71
Select Bibliography
73
2
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vi i
Acknowledgments
Initial work on the translation was facilitated by a residency
at the European College of Literary Translators in Seneffe,
Belgium. Thanks are due to Franoise Wuilmart, director
of the college, and to Jean-Luc Outers, Senior Literary
Counselor in the Belgian Ministry of the French Com-
munity, Brussels. Support for travel to this residency came
from the ofce of Academic Affairs at the Worthington
Scranton campus of Penn State University, and from the
Ofce of International Programs at Penn State. Thanks
also to Frans De Haes at the Archives and Museum of Lit-
erature, Brussels, for his assistance. I am grateful to Elinor
Shaffer and Ashton Nichols for their helpful comments
on an early draft of the introduction. Finally, thanks to
Shu-ching, my wife, who helped in many ways.
2
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i x
Introduction
Relatively neglected since the mid-twentieth century, the
Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck (18621949), win-
ner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911, was once
one of the most widely read authors in the world. He was
appreciated particularly in Britain, the United States, and
Germany. Though a writer in French of Flemish origin,
he remained rather less inuenced by French literature and
culture than by those of Germany and Britain, which con-
formed more closely to his Flemish sensibility and Ger-
manic cast of mind. After the end of World War I he stayed
briey in the limelight, notably touring the United States
and spending time in Hollywood. Yet his best work was al-
ready well behind him. Another brief spell of public atten-
tion accompanied his return to the United States, where
he lived from 1940 to 1947, but after his death in 1949 he
became for the most part a forgotten gure.
We remember Maeterlinck today as a symbolist
pioneer of modern drama and as a poet. His extraordi-
nary literary success came rstly from the innovative and
strangely atmospheric plays he wrote in the last decade
of the nineteenth century, among them Princess Maleine
2
x
(1889), The Intruder (1890), and The Blind (1890). Pelleas
and Melisande (1892) inspired a famous opera by Claude
Debussy (1902) and was also set to music by Gabriel Faur,
Jean Sibelius, and Arnold Schoenberg. In the next phase of
his career, beginning with the twentieth century, Maeter-
linck showed major changes in his artistic interests and
personal outlook, while bolstering his dramatic reputation
with The Blue Bird (1909), his most enduring theatrical ac-
complishment.
Maeterlincks plays won him international acclaim,
and he proceeded to cement his fame with The Treasure
of the Humble (1896) and Wisdom and Destiny (1898), two
collections of philosophical essays, and a hugely successful
book-length essay, The Life of the Bee (1901). Maeterlinck
proved to be an accomplished essayist, and it was this part
of his literary output, rather than his extraordinary plays,
that largely maintained his global reputation, xing him in
the hearts and minds of most of his readers to the greatest
extent over time. The Life of the Bee, his rst extended study
of the workings of the natural world, sold over a quarter
of a million copies, including translations into many lan-
guages. It led to three other studies of its kind: the epony-
mous essay in The Intelligence of Flowers (1907) that forms
the main part of the present translation; The Life of the Ter-
mite (1926), which sold eighty thousand copies in two years;
and The Life of the Ant (1930), of which seventy thousand
copies were printed by its publisher. The Intelligence of
Flowers plus a related essay on scents, also translated here,
comprise about one-third of an original volume of eleven
essays embracing various topics from boxing to immortal-
ity. In this respect The Intelligence of Flowers differs from the
other three works on nature, each of which is an entire
volume on its subject divided into subtitled sections.
xi
Given that Maeterlincks essays assured him of a vast
readership long after his plays had all but faded from pub-
lic view, it is revealing of current critical judgment that he
is not included in a recent one thousand-page encyclope-
dia of the essay as literary genre. This is all the more sur-
prising, since Maeterlinck owed his Nobel Prize mainly
to his essay collections. The Swedish Academy had twice
refused Maeterlinck the prize on account of its resistance
to the symbolism and fatalism of his early work, but in
1911 it nally recognized his exceptional impact on mod-
ern literature.
Maeterlincks mastery of the essay form corresponded
to a great increase in the popularity of this genre in French
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Specula-
tive in the nineteenth-century tradition and imbued with an
elegant and idiosyncratic touch, Maeterlincks free-owing
style of personal expression was ideal for his time. By under-
standing the essay form as an ideal means of conveying phil-
osophical ideas and specialized knowledge in an appealing
way, Maeterlinck conceived The Intelligence of Flowers as
an intellectual vulgate presented with the craft and sensitiv-
ity of a poet. Balancing the scientic and artistic, emotional
and cerebral, specic and general, his essay is a botanical tour
de force written in lyrical and accessible prose.
2
Before introducing The Intelligence of Flowers in more
detail, it may be useful to consider briey the debates on
the relationships of literature to science in general and of
literature to botany in particular.
Work within the humanities since the 1960s, much of
it under the sway of structuralist and poststructuralist theo-
xi i
ries, has brought fresh insights into the ways in which the
sciences and the humanities may interact. Many scholars
argue that the gap between scientists and nonscientists has
never been quite as wide as has often been suggested. We
may see the questioning of objectivity in quantum phys-
ics by scientists, for instance, as concurrent with the ques-
tioning of the nature of scientic enquiry by philosophers,
historians, literary critics, and art critics in the light of
new propositions about meaning, discourse, and textuality.
These scholars look askance at a highly polarized model,
recognizing instead a continuing exchange and encounter
in the movements across artistic and scientic elds as well
as in the construction of their respective discourses.
The emergence of several new critical methods may
help to regenerate interest in Maeterlincks work on na-
ture. Stimulated by the liberal tenor of much poststructur-
alist theory, ecocriticism (or green criticism) is an inter-
disciplinary methodology that has burgeoned since the late
1980s. Broadly concerned with interconnections between
nature and culture, ecocriticism has spawned in turn a lit-
erary subdivision known as ecoromanticism, which studies
Romantic writers views of the natural world. Ecoroman-
ticism is relevant to the study of Maeterlincks nature writ-
ing in view of the great inuence on him of Romantic
philosophy. An alternative view that challenges relativistic
approaches to science and the humanities has come from
sociobiologists, who believe that art has a biological basis.
A literary subdivision of this school of thought, known as
biopoetics (or Darwinian criticism), shares this belief.
For the literary scholar seeking further evidence of
interdisciplinary fruitfulness there are several other good
starting points: the evolution of science ction, or the
reconnection of literature and medicine within the
xi i i
medical humanities, or the successful communication of
scientic knowledge in sophisticated journalism and in
mass-market books by gures such as Edward O. Wilson,
Stephen Hawking, and Stephen Jay Gould. This popular
dissemination of sciencea phenomenon referred to as
the Third Culturerepresents in many respects the surviv-
al of a nineteenth-century tradition of popularized knowl-
edge of a kind that Maeterlinck recast in his own essays on
insects and plants.
2
If we trace botanical science to its origins in ancient Greek
philosophical discourse, we nd that Theophrastus and
Dioscorides established the rst taxonomies, while Plato
attributed desires to plants in a foreshadowing of Arthur
Schopenhauers theory of will in nature. In Roman times
Virgil and Lucretius were among the earliest literary gures
to utilize the imagery of plants and owers in their works.
Botany stagnated until sixteenth-century herbalists, often
considered the fathers of modern botany, began to seek
better methods of plant identication. Their quest culmi-
nated in Carolus Linnaeuss revolutionary eighteenth-cen-
tury system of classication, a milestone that ushered in an
age dominated by systematics (scientic nomenclature and
classication). The eighteenth-century materialist Julien
Offray de La Mettrie described many common elements
of human and plant life, while Erasmus Darwin (grand-
father of Charles), following Linnaeus, speculated on the
emotional and sexual life of plants.
However, botany still retained its basic forms until
the birth of modern biology in the early nineteenth cen-
tury when Lamarckian evolutionism, followed closely by
xiv
Darwinism, revolutionized the entire study of the natural
world. As Bertrand Russell puts it, The prestige of biology
caused men whose thinking was inuenced by science to
apply biological rather than mechanistic categories to the
world. Everything was supposed to be evolving, and it was
easy to imagine an immanent goal.* This vision appealed
strongly to Romantic philosophers and poets. Modern
botany was thus shaped in part by a philosophical ideal-
ism rooted in organicist and pantheistic ideas. Such ideas
were themselves remnants of premodern science, which,
as Michel Foucault and others have argued, did not privi-
lege observation over other kinds of explanations of the
world. Nature philosophy, which emerged primarily from
German Romanticism, placed great store on the idea of a
universal force or spirit animating all living things. Such
an antimechanistic idea was closely identied with that
of a world soul, a concept traceable to Plato, Pythagoras,
and the Stoics. Applied to botany, nature philosophy pro-
duced, for instance, Nanna, or the Soul-Life of Plants (1848),
in which Gustav Theodor Fechner argued for both physi-
cal and psychical life in plants.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jacques-Henri Bernar-
din de Saint-Pierre initiated a new literary discourse of
botany, one from which Maeterlinck would adopt the
idea of nature and art as created and driven by a com-
mon force. In The Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782), in
Letters on Botany (composed 17711773), and in several
other botanical reference works, Rousseau unfolded a
proto-Romantic vision of unspoiled nature wherein the
*Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1962) 698.
xv
lone roamer reects upon his place in the greater scheme
of things. The equally lyrical style of Bernardins Stud-
ies of Nature (1784), notable for its classication of trees,
also proved inuential on the composition of The Intel-
ligence of Flowers, though both Bernardins utilitarian
program and his deistic belief would fail to impress the
agnostically minded Maeterlinck, who refers to them in
chapter three of his essay as naive errors to be avoided.
The literary-botanical discourse was developed
more systematically by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and
John Ruskin, though Ruskin carefully distanced him-
self from its more mystical aspects. Goethe, whose bo-
tanical studies began in 1775 shortly after his move to
Weimar, became the key gure in the development of a
philosophical-scientic study of plant life, and it was he
who coined the term morphology. In works such as The
Metamorphosis of Plants (1790), Studies for a Physiology of
Plants (c. 1795) based on discussions with Friedrich Schil-
ler, and especially Italian Journey (undertaken 17861788,
published 18161829), Goethe searched among plants for
an archetype (Urpanze) and for evidence (following Ba-
ruch Spinoza) of a divine force at work in nature. Writ-
ing to Johann Gottfried von Herder from Naples in May
1787, he spoke excitedly of being very close to the secret
of the reproduction and organization of plants, to proof
of their inner necessity and truth according to a law
that will be applicable to all other living organisms.*
Herder had already established a botanical model for aes-
thetics as early as 1778 in On the Knowing and Feeling of the
*Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey (17861788), translated by W. H.
Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982) 3056.
xvi
Human Soul. Working later within the same panpsychical
framework, Samuel Taylor Coleridge based a large part
of his Theory of Life (1848) around plant analogies, while
Thomas Carlyle thought of plant growth as comparable
to artistic creation.
Ruskins Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers (1874)
collects work begun as early as 1842 and further developed
in 1868. In a witty and idiosyncratic metatext invoking
art, literature, philosophy, and religion, he sought to make
botany more enjoyable than in the context of orthodox
science with its complex system of nomenclature. For
Ruskin, botany was as much biographical as descriptive. In
the Preface to Modern Painters (1844), he claims the dif-
ference between the mere botanists knowledge of plants,
and the great poets or painters knowledge of them is that
the one notes their distinctions for the sake of swelling his
herbarium, the other, that he may render them vehicles of
expression and emotion.*
Let us also remember that from the late eighteenth
century a visual art modeled on plants developed alongside
this literary discourse. Botanical illustrators explored the aes-
thetic potential of plant life in paintings, drawings, and en-
gravings, later exercising a decisive inuence on the scientic
romanticism of art nouveau and on the plant designs William
Morris contributed to the aesthetics of the arts and crafts
movement. Among famous art nouveau designers, Emile
Gall was also a botanist, while Eugne Grasset (in Plants
and Their Application to Ornament, 1897) and Ernst Haeckel
(who coined ecology) were hugely inuential in dening
*Cited by M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the
Critical Tradition (New York: Norton, 1958) 312.
xvi i
formal variations of the style. Maeterlinck thus grew
up in a blooming botanical culture. The Royal Botanical
Society of Belgium had been founded in 1862, the year of
his birth, and in 1870 the Brussels Botanical Garden was
opened. For the young Maeterlinck botany was a surging
science that also promised untold artistic delight.
2
Maeterlincks four principal essays on nature are among
the last examples of a certain kind of humanistic science to
be appreciated in Western culture up to the early twentieth
century. In each of his three entomological studies Maeter-
linck reconstructs a model rst shaped by ancient Greek
philosophy: an intelligent natural society comparable in
many respects to that of mankind. In The Intelligence of
Flowers he draws similar analogies between the organiza-
tion and inventiveness of the oral and human worlds. The
discourse of Maeterlincks nature essays, based on philo-
sophical and artistic responses to the methodical observa-
tion of nature, gradually fell out of fashion as the dialogue
between science and the humanitiesdespite spirited de-
fenses by Albert Einstein, Alfred North Whitehead, Aldous
Huxley, and othersgave way to new specialist and tech-
nocratic norms.
The Intelligence of Flowers belongs to a period
of about fteen years in Maeterlincks career from 1897
onward. Emerging from a pessimism that nonetheless had
engendered his major symbolist plays, Maeterlinck en-
tered a transitional phase still inspired by Schopenhauer
but in more positive, optimistic, and cheerful ways. This
period became clear in Maeterlincks preface to Paul
Lacomblezs 1901 edition of his plays, a statement that
xvi i i
announced a curious and encouraging blend of science,
spiritualism, and occultism henceforth to be his preoc-
cupation. Maeterlincks Nobel Prize in 1911 marked the
height of his fame after which he returned to a mood
of fatalistic doubt, conrmed by his 1911 essay collec-
tion Death (published in 1913). By the time he published
his essays on the termite and the ant, his view of these
natural societies suggests failure and despair rather than
perfect harmony. The termite world is no longer a role
model for mankind, but closer to the dystopian visions
later ctionalized by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.
During his brief sunny period a botanical passion
helped to instill in him a certain humility and content-
ment, and he spent much time after 1903 in his house Les
Quatre Chemins (The Four Ways) near Grasse in southern
France, where he pursued his study of owers, especially
those produced locally for perfume, and carried out exper-
iments in hybridization. Some early reections found their
way, amid other subjects, into The Double Garden (1904),
but it was in The Intelligence of Flowers that Maeter-
linck expressed his botanical ideas in full.
The Intelligence of Flowers is a detailed record
of a philosophical naturalist at work, and it follows The
Life of the Bee in showing Maeterlinck, a famous man of
letters, very much an inheritor of the Romantic notion
of poet as medium, seeking to present (or popularize, if
you will) scientic knowledge to his large audience. That
this enterprise came wrapped in a cosmological pack-
age revealed both his temperament and the eclecticism
of much turn-of-the-century culture. His contempo-
rary Edward Thomas (1911) calls him a mystic man of
the world, while present-day scholar Patrick McGuin-
ness chooses the term boudoir mystic to describe
xi x
Maeterlincks vague agnostic spirituality.* The essay
on the intelligence of owers integrates several dis-
courses: science, literature, philosophy, and (rather para-
doxically) an earthy mysticism, all skillfully sutured by
Maeterlincks rhetorical command and uent style. Even
though Thomas retains doubts about the authors starry
urbanity and science in fancy dress, he acknowledges
that Maeterlincks descriptions can be masterly, more
brief and precise at their best than those of Ruskin, with
which alone they can be compared.

Deriving many ideas from Schopenhauers On

the Will in Nature (1836), Maeterlinck asserts that ow-
ers possess thought without knowledge, a capacity that
nonetheless, as in bees, constitutes a form of intelligence.
Maeterlinck associates this belief in vegetable intelligence
with (to invoke William Wordsworths Lines Written a
Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, 1798) his own sense
sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused /
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, a sense in
accord with his view of human knowledge as the high-
est but by no means exclusive agent of a supreme or-
der, of a motion and a spirit, that . . . rolls through all
things (Wordsworth again).

Maeterlinck was directly

inuenced both by the German Romantics (particularly
Novalis, whom he translated into French) and by certain
*Patrick McGuinness, Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 6.

Edward Thomas, Maurice Maeterlinck (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1911) 255,
267.

See Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1798, edited by W. J. B.

Owen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) 11415.
xx
of their exponents in the English-speaking world, nota-
bly Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Maeterlincks corresponding belief in all life forms
as immortal and in that which creates them as being
intellectually unknowable reveals the inuence on him
also of mystical and gnostic thought: Jakob Bhme and
Emanuel Swedenborg, for instance, and especially his fel-
low Fleming, Jan van Ruusbroec. Maeterlincks love of
the fourteenth-century mystics work (he translated The
Adornment of Spiritual Marriage into French in 1891) also
bolstered an identication with the Germanic mind that
he had begun to feel several years before Octave Mir-
beaus 1890 review of Princess Maleine in Le Figaro cata-
pulted him to sudden fame.
Yet, practical, reasonable man of the world that he
was, Maeterlinck would only go so far down a mystical
road. He showed little inclination to true mystical de-
tachment from the material world. Despite his Romantic
sensibility, he was by no means opposed to reason or sci-
ence. Maeterlincks belief in the possibility of a mystical
reason suggests the intuitive positivism of Henri Bergson,
who was perhaps the closest of contemporary philoso-
phers to Maeterlincks way of thinking. Fully aware that
the discoveries of modern biology exposed the limits of
neoplatonism, Maeterlinck took an opportunity in The
Intelligence of Flowers to incorporate elements of Dar-
winism into his holistic vision. In doing so he followed a
series of works (The Fertilization of Orchids, 1862; Variation
in Animals and Plants under Domestication, 1868; The Power
of Movement in Plants, 1880) in which Darwin grants to
plants near-human powers in their ability to ght for sur-
vival, to reproduce, and to vary in form. Though many
of Maeterlincks botanical references are from traditional
xxi
sources, he cites, in addition to Darwin, the experiments
of two contemporary French botanists, Gaston Bonnier
and E-L. Bouvier. Given the extent of Darwins inu-
ence by the turn of the century, it would seem strange
if Maeterlinck had not followed him in many of his sci-
entic ideas (as did H. G. Wells, for instance, in his 1895
story, The Flowering of the Strange Orchid). After all,
Darwin himself was greatly inuenced by social philoso-
phy and by literature, and it is unsurprising to learn how
much Darwins own botanical work owed to ideas he
drew from creative writers, and in particular, like Ruskin,
from the poetry of John Milton.
It is tempting to suggest that had Maeterlinck been
less inclined early in his career to practice suggestive and
intuitive thinking, to relish hidden correspondences and
esoteric visionsall that made him, like the young Wil-
liam Butler Yeats, an exemplary symbolist writerhe
might instead have found himself at home in naturalism
and, like mile Zola, applying strict scientic methods to
his literary art. Present-day critic Paul Gorceix resolves this
apparent duality by insisting on a methodological unity
between the symbolist poet-dramatist and the scientic
naturalist in Maeterlinck, thus placing his work on nature
in an overarching eld: the history of ideas. In Gorceixs
view, there is no creative break between these two identi-
ties. Maeterlincks close observation of plants led him to
speculate analogically on the mysteries of life in man and
the universe, and his work constitutes a whole, of which
the cement is the epistemology of totality.*
*Paul Gorceix, Postface, in Maurice Maeterlinck, La Vie de la nature
(Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1997) 501. All translations from French are
my own.
xxi i
As for the question of evolution, Maeterlincks abil-
ity to reconcile art, science, and philosophy in his liter-
ary method allows us to place him between the opposite
poles of scientic positivism and religious belief. In sec-
tion xxiii of The Intelligence of Flowers, he attempts a
denition of evolution: Does not this rather vague word
mean, in the nal analysis, adaptation, modication, intel-
ligent progress? For Maeterlinck these processes are en-
tirely consistent with a Romantic view of the universe,
for they are driven in ower and man alike by a common
spirit: We follow the same path as the soul of this great
world (section xxix). And though he speaks almost in
the next breath of a universe molded by unknown sub-
stances, he attempts, in the nal section of his essay, to
specify this all-encompassing spiritual force in a formula-
tion that brings him as close to religious belief as he allows:
A scattered, general intelligence, a kind of universal uid
that penetrates diversely the organisms it encounters, de-
pending on whether they are good or bad conductors of
consciousness. Mankind would represent, until now, upon
this earth, the realm of life that offered the least resistance
to this uid that the religions call divine.
Even if we choose not to accept Maeterlincks curious
blend of science and spiritualism, he occupies nonetheless
a special place in the progressive literary and intellectual
genealogy of the early twentieth century. We are offered
in a highly palatable form the ndings of an unsystematic,
rather old-fashioned thinker, endowed with an exception-
al literary talent for enlivening the study of botany and
for making it not only a more accessible science but also,
rather quaintly from our contemporary viewpoint, part
of a quest for all-encompassing but ultimately unveri-
able truths. This position seems nonetheless at one with
xxi i i
the respect accorded in the late nineteenth century to a
generalist spirit of knowledge in which little conict oc-
curred between the claims of science and the capacities of
the imagination. This coexistence of seemingly opposed
beliefs bears witness to the presence of an episteme (to use
Foucaults term), a discursive space specic to the period,
one in which appropriate conditions existed for the con-
struction, articulation, and reception of various currents
of knowledge and thought. In the late intellectual life of
Victorian Britain, for instance, literary gures such as Sam-
uel Butler and Frederic W. H. Myers, as well as a hetero-
dox group of scientic theorists, practiced a philosophy of
honest doubt, rejecting institutional religion and scientic
naturalism but not the potential union of science, spirit,
and the imaginative life.
The Intelligence of Flowers impressed some mod-
ernist authors. Marcel Proust frequently cited Maeter-
lincks work, and he drew directly on it for his analogy
of orchid reproduction in the rst part of Sodom and
Gomorrah, the fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time.
Most early critics of The Intelligence of Flowers were
also impressed by Maeterlincks expression of more ratio-
nal and ethical ideas as well as by his bravura performances
as a poet of science. B. Timmermans (1912), for instance,
suggests that Maeterlincks nature essays indicate a moral
rather than an intellectual quest, and thus to judge him as
a dilettante is to ignore his belief in the moral necessity of
intelligent work irrespective of scientic results or of limits
to human knowledge. Yet many of these early critics also
share misgivings about Maeterlincks scholarly attributes.
Among them are a few vehement opponents for whom
neither moral incentive nor poetic talent may compen-
sate for scientic and philosophical weaknesses. Maurice
xxiv
Lecat (1937), for example, derides Maeterlincks poor doc-
umentation (or rather, lack of it), wheeling up two big
guns, Massart and Bonnier, to bolster his attack. Ironically
enough, Bonnier, to whose experiments on toxin secretion
Maeterlinck refers in The Intelligence of Flowers, had
earlier been generous in his praise of The Life of the Bee.
A similarly mixed response persists in later criticism
of Maeterlincks essay. Robert Vivier (1964) reiterates the
view that Maeterlinck acknowledged a need to stay within
practical human bounds, an opinion shared by Belgian
modernist author Franz Hellens based on his own con-
versations with Maeterlinck. For Vivier, Maeterlinck seeks
wisdom and happiness, and occasionally at the most a
quarter-hour of light dizziness on the balcony of hypoth-
esis.* His careful observation of the natural world serves
to check the possible excesses of his transcendent imagina-
tion. W. D. Halls (1960) reinforces this opinion: the decline
of Christianity prompts Maeterlinck to seek a new moral
code, a search that sets the tone of The Intelligence of
Flowers and leads its author toward a humanist and, by
1913, an overtly socialist position.
Halls points to Maeterlincks supercial knowledge
of Darwinism, claiming that the author is rather less suc-
cessful as a botanist than an entomologist. Indeed, while
Maeterlincks career coincided with a number of impor-
tant developments in biology, it appears unlikely that he
was fully aware of those in microbiology, evolutionary tax-
onomy, biochemistry, and morphology and, most impor-
tantly, following the 1900 rediscovery of Gregor Mendels
1866 paper, of those leading to the birth of genetics.
*Robert Vivier, Deux aspects de Maeterlinck, in Le Centenaire de
Maurice Maeterlinck (Brussels: Palais des Acadmies, 1964) 235.
xxv
Within the eld of botany, the American horticul-
turalist Luther Burbank published his New Creations in
Fruits and Flowers catalog in 1893, revolutionizing the
art of hybridization and furthering a belief in plant will
and sensory perception. Burbanks work is interesting in
connection with Maeterlinck in that it was inuenced
by a literary tradition of American writer-naturalists that
includes Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, Liberty
Hyde Bailey, and the pioneering botanists, John Bartram
Sr. and William Bartram Jr. The success in Europe of
William Bartrams Travels (1791), for instance, inuenced
Wordsworth and Coleridge, among others. In 1905 the Vi-
ennese biologist Raoul Franc published Germs of Mind in
Plants, while in India at that time Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose
was rigorously shaping his view of the integral relations
between human and plant life.
Among more recent critics, Jacques Vallet (1985) places
Maeterlinck at the head of a line of modern Belgian writ-
ers on nature that includes Robert Gofn and Jean de Bos-
chre. Vallet reminds us that Maeterlinck calls for humility
in our perception and understanding of the natural world.
He further notes that in the 1930s Maeterlinck warned far
ahead of modern ecological movements that our survival
depends on our cooperation with nature in all its forms,
and that natural disaster would be the price to pay for our
failure to do so.
What then of Maeterlincks work in relation to bo-
tanical discourse today? We may reasonably argue that
Maeterlincks essay anticipated a revival of holistic botany
that forms part of a growing ecological consciousness to-
day. The publication in 1973 of The Secret Life of Plants by
Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird renewed the repu-
tations of pioneers like Bose and furthered a vogue for
xxvi
conversation and intimate behavior between people and
plants. Various other writers and naturalists have contrib-
uted to this resurgent botanical discourse from such per-
spectives as literature, horticulture, mathematics, comput-
er graphics, and the visual arts. And though one writer,
Michael Pollan, rejects plant intelligence and will in favor
of a symbiotic thesis, his meditation on the tulip is clearly
in the spirit of Maeterlinck: We gazed even further into
the blossom of a ower and found something more: the
crucible of beauty, if not art, and maybe even a glimpse
into the meaning of life.*
The symbiotic Gaia hypothesis, pace Pollan, has cer-
tain afnities with Maeterlincks work albeit minus the
Romantic element. Though some of its enthusiasts have
attempted to spiritualize or supernaturalize it, this theory
of global self-regulation, formulated in the late 1970s by
James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, bases itself on an evo-
lutionary symbiosis among all living organisms, a belief
that Maeterlinck might well have found attractive were he
still alive today. Indeed, he may have known the coining of
symbiosis to describe organic coexistence by the German
botanist Anton de Bary in 1873. Lovelocks latest vision
of the revenge of Gaia on heedless humankindreminds
us of Maeterlincks own warnings. Maeterlinck would per-
haps also have liked the fact that Gaia (whose name was
suggested to Lovelock by William Golding) works against
both academic specialization and anthropocentrism in its
view of the interdependence of all living species and in its
desire to rethink our vital relationship with planet Earth.
*Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plants-Eye View of the World (New
York: Random House, 2001) 109.
xxvi i
What characterizes the most convincing nature
writing, suggests Richard Mabey, a leading British natu-
ralist and author of several important botanical studies, is
a willingness to admit both the kindredness and the other-
ness of the natural world. Its history is thus in part a history
of our views about ourselves as a species, part of the quest
for the essential characteristics and boundaries of being
human.* His description implies that such writing also
prompts us to guard our sense of wonder, and to think of
our relationship to nature in sympathetic, respectful, and
responsible ways. One hundred years after its original ap-
pearance, The Intelligence of Flowers continues to ex-
emplify this ideal. Even though scientic knowledge, in-
cluding that of botany, has continued to advance at a great
pace since Maeterlincks time, his essayerudite, prescient,
and eloquentremains both relevant to our understand-
ing of nature and highly pleasurable to read.
*Richard Mabey, The Oxford Book of Nature Writing (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995) vii.
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The Intelligence of Flowers
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1
The Intelligence of Flowers
I
Here I wish simply to recall several facts known to all
botanists. I have made no discovery, and my modest con-
tribution comes down to a few basic observations. It
goes without saying that I do not intend to review every
proof of intelligence offered to us by plants. Those proofs
are ongoing and innumerable, especially among owers,
where the striving of plant life for light and spirit is at its
most focused.
If we allow for some awkward or unfortunate plants
and owers, none is entirely lacking in wisdom and in-
genuity. All struggle to accomplish their task; all have the
magnicent ambition to overrun and conquer the surface
of the earth by thereupon multiplying innitely the form
of existence they represent. To reach this goal, they need,
on account of the law that binds them to the soil, to over-
come difculties much greater than those facing the mul-
tiplication of animals. For that reason most of them have
2
2
recourse to ruses, schemes, mechanisms, and traps that in
respect, for instance, of mechanics, ballistics, aviation, or
observation of insects often predate the inventions and
knowledge of mankind.
II
It would be superuous to redraw the picture of the great
systems of oral fertilization: the play of stamens and pistil,
the seductiveness of scents, the appeal of harmonious and
striking colors, the development of nectar, totally useless
to the ower, and which it manufactures only to attract
and hold the foreign liberator, the messenger of love, bee,
bumblebee, y, buttery, moth, which must bring it the kiss
of the distant, invisible, motionless lover.
This plant world that strikes us as so tranquil, so re-
signed, where all seems to be acceptance, silence, obedi-
ence, reverence, is on the contrary one wherein the revolt
against destiny is at its most vehement and most obstinate.
The essential organ, the nourishing organ of the plant, its
root, attaches it indissolubly to the soil. If it is difcult to
ascertain, among the great laws that overwhelm us, the one
that weighs heaviest on our shoulders, for the plant there is
no doubt: it is the law that condemns it to immobility from
birth to death. So it knows better than we, who fritter our
energies, against what it must rst arise. And the energy
of its obsession, as it rises from the shadows of its roots to
organize itself and to blossom in the light of its ower, is
3
an incomparable spectacle. It strains its whole being in one
single plan: to escape above ground from the fatality below;
to elude and transgress the dark and weighty law, to free it-
self, to break the narrow sphere, to invent or invoke wings,
to escape as far as possible, to conquer the space wherein
fate encloses it, to approach another kingdom, to enter a
moving, animated world. Is not the fact that it succeeds in
doing so as surprising as if we were to succeed in living
outside the time assigned us by another destiny or in en-
tering a universe freed from the weightiest laws of matter?
We shall see that the ower sets man a prodigious example
of insubordination, courage, perseverance, and ingenuity. If
we had put into trying to uplift the various inevitabilities
that weigh us downthose, for instance, of pain, old age,
and deatheven half the energy that some tiny ower in
our garden has spent, we could be forgiven for thinking
our fate would be very different from what it is.
III
In most plants this need for movement, this appetite for
space, manifests itself concurrently in both ower and fruit.
It is easily explicable in the case of the fruit; or, at any
rate, it only reveals a less complex experience and fore-
sight. Contrary to what occurs in the animal kingdom,
and because of the terrible law of absolute immobility, the
main and worst enemy of the seed is the paternal strain.
We are in a strange world where the parents, incapable of
4
moving, know they are condemned to stie or starve their
offspring. All seed that falls at the foot of a tree or plant
is lost or will sprout in a hard place. Hence the immense
effort to cast off the yoke and conquer space. Hence the
marvelous systems of scattering, of propulsion, of aviation,
that we nd in all parts of the forest and on the plain;
among others, merely to mention in passing a few of the
most curious: the winged screw or samara of the maple,
the bract of the lime, the gliding-machine of the thistle,
dandelion, and salsify; the detonating springs of the spurge,
the extraordinary squirting pear of the balsam apple, the
woolen hooks of the eriophorous plants; and a thousand
other unexpected and astonishing mechanisms, for there
is, so to speak, no seed that has not invented some method
wholly suited to itself for escaping the maternal shadow.
We simply would not believe, if we had not practiced
botany, just how much imagination and genius expends
itself in all the greenery that delights the eye. Look, for
instance, at the pretty seed pod of the scarlet pimpernel,
the ve valves of the garden balsam, the ve spring-load-
ed capsules of the geranium, etc. While you are at it, do
not forget to examine the common poppyhead that one
nds at any herbalists. There is, in that nice big head, a
prudence and foresight worthy of the highest praise. We
know that it contains thousands of extremely ne, tiny
black seeds. The goal is to scatter these seeds in the most
adroit manner and as far as possible. If the capsule con-
taining them were to split, fall, or open up underneath,
the precious black powder would simply form a useless
5
heap at the foot of the stem. But it can only emerge from
apertures pierced high up on the husk. Once ripened, this
leans over on its peduncle, sways at the slightest breath
of air and, literally with the very same gesture as a sower,
scatters the seeds in space.
Shall I speak of the seeds that plan their own dispersal
by birds, and which, to entice them, huddle, like the mis-
tletoe, the juniper, the serviceberry, etc., within a sugary
husk? There is such reasoning in this, such an understand-
ing of nal causes that we hardly dare insist on it for fear
of renewing the naive errors of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.
Yet the facts cannot otherwise be explained. The sugary
husk is as useless to the seed as is the nectar, which attracts
the bees, to the ower. The bird eats the fruit because it is
sweet and at the same time swallows the seed, which is in-
digestible. The bird takes off and shortly thereafter rends the
seed just as it received it but stripped of its husk and ready
to sprout far from the dangers of its place of birth.
IV
But let us get back to simpler schemes. Pick from the road-
side, in the rst stful to hand, a blade of some grass or
other, and you will catch a small, independent, unagging,
unexpected intelligence at work. Here are two poor creep-
ing plants that you could have encountered a thousand
times on your walks, for they may be found everywhere,
even in the most barren corners where a pinch of soil has
6
strayed. They are two varieties of wild medic (Medicago),
two weeds in the humblest sense of that word. One bears
a reddish ower, the other a yellow powder puff the size of
a pea. To see them slide and hide themselves in the lawn,
among the proud grasses, one would never imagine that,
well before the illustrious geometrician and physician of
Syracuse, they have discovered the amazing properties of
the Archimedean screw and attempted to apply it not to
the raising of liquids but to the art of ying. So they lodge
their seeds in easy spirals, made up of three or four admi-
rably constructed revolutions, reckoning thereby to delay
their fall and consequently, with the aid of the wind, to
prolong their aerial voyage. One of them, the yellow one,
has even perfected the device of the red one by decorating
the edges of the spiral with a double row of spikes, with
the clear intention of hooking it in passing to either hu-
man clothing or animal eece. Clearly it hopes to ally the
advantages of eriophilythat is to say, the scattering of
seeds by sheep, goats, rabbits, etc.to those of anemophily,
that is to say, scattering by wind.
What is most touching in this entire huge effort is
its uselessness. The poor red and yellow medics have made
an error of judgment. Their extraordinary screws are of no
use to them. They can only work if they fall from a certain
height, from the top of a tall tree or from a grassy knoll;
but, constructed at grass level, they have only a quarter-
turn to make before hitting the ground. We have here a
curious example of the mistakes, the trial and error, the ex-
periments and the minor miscalculations, frequent enough,
7
of nature: for only those who have barely studied it would
claim that nature never errs.
In passing, let us note that other varieties of medic
(not to mention the clover, another leguminous and papil-
ionaceous plant that is virtually indistinguishable from the
one that concerns us here) have not adopted these aero-
nautical devices and retain the primitive method of the
pod. In the case of one of them, the Medicago aurantiaca, we
may easily grasp the transition from highly elaborate pod
to screw. Another variety, the Medicago scutellata, rounds off
the screw in the form of a bowl. It seems therefore that we
are witnessing the stirring spectacle of a kind of invention
in progress, the efforts of a family that has not yet worked
out its destiny and is seeking the best way of ensuring its
future. Is it not perhaps in the course of this research that,
having been disappointed by the spiral, the yellow medic
adds the spikes or the woolen hooks, telling itself not un-
reasonably that since its foliage attracts sheep, it is inevi-
table and proper that sheep should assume responsibility
for its procreation? And, in the end, is it not on account of
this fresh effort and this bright idea that the yellow-ow-
ered medic is innitely more widespread than its stronger
red-owered cousin?
V
It is not only in the seed or ower but in the whole plant,
stems, leaves, roots that we discover, if we but lower our
8
heads for a moment over their humble work, many traces
of a lively and shrewd intelligence. Remind yourselves of
the magnicent efforts of thwarted branches seeking the
light, or the ingenious and courageous struggle of trees
in danger. For my part, I shall never forget the admirable
example of heroism set to me by an enormous hundred-
year-old laurel the other day in Provence, in the wild and
delightful gorges of the Loup, fragrant all over with vio-
lets. You could easily read on its tortuous and, so to speak,
convulsive trunk all the drama of its tough and difcult
life. A bird or the wind, masters of destiny both, had car-
ried the seed to the side of a rock that drops like an iron
curtain, and the tree was born there, two hundred meters
above the torrent, inaccessible and solitary, among scorch-
ing and barren stones. From its very rst hours, it had sent
its blind roots on a long and painful search for precious
water and soil. But this was only the congenital concern
of a species that knows the arid Midi. The young stem had
to resolve a much graver and more unexpected problem:
it set out on a vertical plane, so that its head, instead of
reaching for the sky, leaned over the gulf. It had therefore,
despite the crushing weight of the branches, to set the rst
surge straight, stubbornly to bend the frustrated trunk just
above the surface of the rock, and thuslike a swimmer
throwing back his headby an incessant will, tension, and
contraction, to sustain the heavy crown of leaves rising up
into the sky.
From that point on, around that vital knot, were
concentrated all the preoccupations, all the energy, all the
9
conscious, free genius of the plant. The monstrous bend,
grown abnormally large, revealed one by one the succes-
sive anxieties of a kind of thought that knew how to avail
itself of the warnings given to it by rain and gale. Year after
year the dome of foliage grew weightier, with no other
concern but to expand in the heat and light, while a dark
canker ate away deeply at the tragic arm maintaining it in
space. Then, obeying goodness knows what order of the
instinct, two solid roots, two hairy cables, emerging from
the trunk at more than two feet above the bend, came to
moor it to the granite face. Had they truly been brought
forth by distress, or else had they been waiting, perhaps
with foresight, since the rst days, for the critical hour of
danger in order to enhance the value of their assistance?
Or was it just a happy coincidence? What human eye will
ever capture these silent dramas, too long-lasting for our
brief lives?*
VI
Among the plants that offer the most striking proof of
initiative, those we might call animated or capable of feel-
ings would merit detailed study. I shall content myself by
*Let us put this together with the intelligent action of another root of which
Brandis (On Life and Polarity) recounts to us the exploits. In getting stuck in
the earth, it had met the old sole of a boot; to pass this obstacle, which it was
apparently the rst of its species to nd in its way, it subdivided itself in as
many parts as there were holes left by the stitch points, then, once past the
obstacle, it reunited itself and knitted together again all its various rootlets,
in such a way as to reconstitute a single, homogeneous taproot.
10
recalling the delightful terrors of that sensitive plant we
all know, the shrinking mimosa. Other herbs with sponta-
neous movements are less well known; the Hedysareae, in
particular, among which the Hedysarum gyrans or swaying
sainfoin, which bestirs itself in a surprising way. This small
leguminous plant, originally from Bengal but often grown
in our hothouses, performs a kind of nonstop, intricate
dance in honor of the light. Its leaves divide themselves
into three leaets, one broad and terminal, the other two
narrow and planted at the base of the rst. Each of these
leaets has its own different movement. They live in in-
cessant, rhythmical, and almost chronometrical agitation.
They are so sensitive to light that their dance slows down
or speeds up according to whether the clouds hide or re-
veal the chink of sky they face. They are, as we can see, true
photometers, and this well before Crookess invention of
the natural otheoscopes.
VII
But these plants, to which we should add the Droseras,
the Dionaeas, and many others, are nervous beings already
going slightly beyond the mysterious and probably imagi-
nary ridge that separates the plant from the animal king-
dom. We have no need to climb that far, and we nd as
much intelligence and almost as much visible spontaneity
at the other end of the world that concerns us, in the lower
depths where the plant is barely distinguishable from silt or
11
stone: I refer to the fabulous clan of Cryptogams, observ-
able in detail only beneath a microscope. It is why we pass
by this clan in silence, even though the spore play of the
mushroom, fern, and above all rough horsetail or scouring
rush, is of incomparable delicacy and ingenuity. But among
the aquatic plants, living in primeval mud or slime, less
secretive wonders are performed. Since the fertilization of
their owers cannot take place under water, each of them
has come up with a different system for the pollen to be
scattered in the dry zone. Thus the Zosteras, that is to say,
the vulgar marine eelgrass with which we stuff mattresses,
carefully enclose their owers in a true divingbell; the wa-
terlilies send their owers to blossom on the surface of
the pond, supporting and nourishing them on an endless
peduncle which extends along with any rise in water level.
The false waterlily (Villarsia nymphoides), with no extend-
able peduncle, simply lets its own owers go: they climb
to the surface and burst like bubbles. The waterchestnut
(Trapa natans) equips its own with a kind of air-inated
vessel; they arise and open, then fertilization completed,
the air of the vessel is replaced by a mucilaginous liquid
heavier than water, and the whole device sinks back into
the silt where the fruits will ripen.
The system of the bladderwort is even more intri-
cate. Here is how M. Henri Bocquillon describes it in
The Life of Plants:
These plants, widespread in ponds, ditches, pools, and
puddles of water in peat bogs, are invisible in winter;
they rest in the mud. Their extended stem, spindly,
12
trailing, is furnished with leaves reduced to ramied
laments. At the axil of the leaves thus transformed, we
notice a kind of small pear-shaped pocket, with an ap-
erture at its pointed upper end. This aperture carries a
valve that can only open from the outside in; its sides
are nished with ramied hairs; the inside of the pocket
is lined with other small secretory hairs that give it an
appearance of velvet. When the moment of owering
comes, the little axillary skins ll with air; the more
this air tends to escape, the tighter it closes the valve.
Eventually it gives the plant great specic buoyancy and
guides it to the waters surface. It is only then that those
charming small yellow owers open up, resembling
strange little faces with more or less bulbous lips and a
palate striped with orange or rust-colored lines. Dur-
ing the months of June, July, and August, they display
their fresh colors amid the detritus of vegetation, rising
gracefully above the murky water. But fertilization has
taken place, the fruit develops, and the roles switch; the
surrounding water presses on the valve of the utricles,
forces its way in, rushes into the cavity, makes the plant
heavier, and compels it to drop again into the mud.
Is it not strange to see collected in this age-old device
a few of the most productive and recent human inven-
tions: the play of valves, the pressure of liquids and air, the
Archimedean principle studied and utilized? As the author
I have just quoted goes on to observe: The engineer who
rst attached a otation device to a sunken vessel could
barely have imagined that an analogous process had been
in use for thousands of years. In a world that we hold to
be unconscious and devoid of intelligence, we imagine at
13
rst that the very least of our ideas creates new schemes
and relationships. On looking closer at things, it seems ex-
tremely likely that we are unable to create anything at all.
The last to arrive on this earth, we simply discover what
has always existed, and like awestruck children we follow
the path that life had made before us. Moreover, it is per-
fectly natural and reassuring that this be so. But we shall
return to this point.
VIII
We cannot leave the aquatic plants without briey recall-
ing the life of the most fabulous of them all: the legend-
ary eelgrass, a Hydrocharid whose nuptials form the most
tragic episode in the love life of owers.
The eelgrass is a rather unremarkable specimen, with
none of the strange grace of the waterlily or of certain sub-
aquatic tufts. But we can say that nature has taken pleasure
in instilling in it a ne idea. The whole existence of this
little plant is spent at the bottom of the water, in a kind of
half-sleep, until the hour of the nuptials when it aspires to
a new way of life. Then the female ower slowly unfurls
the long spiral of its peduncle, rises, emerges, oats, and
blossoms on the surface of the pond. From a nearby strain,
the male owers, catching sight of it across the sunlit water,
arise in turn, full of anticipation, toward the one that sways,
awaits them, calls them to a magical world. But halfway
there, they suddenly feel held back: their stem, the very
14
source of their life, is too short; they will never make it
into the light, into the one place where union of pistil and
stamens can occur.
Is there a crueler oversight or test in all of nature?
Imagine the drama of this desire, the homing in on the
untouchable, the transparent fatality, and the impossible
without visible obstacle!
It would be insoluble, like our own drama upon this
earth, but here is where an unexpected element comes into
play. Did the males foresee their disappointment? For they
always enclose an air bubble in their hearts, like we enclose
in our soul a desperate thought of release. It is as if they
hesitate for a moment, then with a magnicent effortthe
most supernatural that I know of in the annals of insects
and owersto soar toward happiness, they deliberately
break the bond that secures them to life. They tear them-
selves away from their peduncle and with an incomparable
surge, amid pearls of lightheartedness, their petals break
the surface of the water. Mortally wounded, but radiant
and free, they oat momentarily alongside their indiffer-
ent ances; the union takes place, after which the martyrs
drift off to perish downstream, while the already pregnant
spouse seals her corolla, where their last gasp survives, rolls
up her spiral, and returns to the depths, there to ripen the
fruit of the heroic kiss.
Must we spoil this pretty picture, rigorously precise
but seen from the bright side, by looking at it from the
dark side too? Why not? Sometimes the dark side yields
truths as interesting as those from the bright side. This
15
delightful tragedy is only perfect when we consider the
intelligence, the aspiration of the species. But if we ob-
serve individuals, we often see them acting out this ideal
plan awkwardly and incorrectly. Sometimes the male
owers rise to the surface when there are not yet any pis-
tillated owers in the vicinity. And at other times, when
low water permits them easily to reach their companions,
they still break their stems no less automatically and use-
lessly. I maintain here, once again, that the whole genius
rests in the species, in life or nature, and that the individ-
ual on the whole is stupid. Only in mankind do we nd
true emulation of the two intelligences, an increasingly
precise and active tendency toward a kind of balance that
is the great secret of our future.
IX
The parasitic plants also offer us unusual and mischievous
sights, such as that astonishing Cuscuta commonly known
as the dodder. It has no leaves and its stem needs only reach
several centimeters in length for it to abandon its roots de-
liberately, so as to entwine itself around its chosen victim
and into which it sinks its suckers. From then on it lives
wholly at the expense of its prey. It is impossible to outwit
its insight; it will refuse any sustenance that does not suit
it, and it will go in search, as far away as necessary, of any
stem of hemp, hop, lucerne, or ax that suits its tempera-
ment and taste.
16
This dodder draws our attention naturally to the
creepers, which have highly noteworthy habits of which
something should be said. Moreover, those of us who have
lived for a while in the countryside have had many op-
portunities to admire the instinct and kind of vision that
directs the tendrils of the Virginia creeper or the morning
glory toward the shaft of a rake or spade leaning up against
a wall. Move the rake, and the next day the tendril will
have fully returned and found it again. Schopenhauer, in
his treatise On the Will in Nature, in the chapter devoted to
the physiology of plants, summarizes this and several other
points with a host of observations and experiments that
would take too long to list here. I thus refer the reader to
Schopenhauer; there he will nd information on numer-
ous sources and references. Is there any need for me to add
that in over fty or sixty years these sources have strangely
multiplied and that the subject furthermore is virtually
inexhaustible?
Among so many different inventions, subterfuges, and
precautions, let me also mention, by way of example, the
sound judgment of the radiate hyposerid (Hyposeris radia-
ta), a small plant with yellow owers, rather similar to the
dandelion, which one nds often on old walls along the
Riviera. To ensure the simultaneous spread and stability of
its race, it carries at the same time two types of seed. One
detaches easily and is equipped with wings to let the wind
pick it up, while the other, which does not have wings, re-
mains imprisoned in the inorescence and is released only
when the latter decomposes.
17
The case of the spiny cocklebur (Xanthium spinosum)
shows us to what extent certain systems of scattering are
well conceived and successfully operated. This cocklebur
is a frightful weed bristling with barbaric prickles. Not so
long ago it was unknown in Western Europe and nobody,
naturally, had thought of introducing it. It owes its con-
quests to the hooks that complete the capsules of its fruits
and catch on animal eece. Originally from Russia, it came
to us in bales of wool imported from the furthest steppes
of Muscovy, and we may trace on a map the stages of this
great migrant that conquered a new world.
The Italian catchy (Silene italica), a simple little
white ower that we nd in abundance beneath olive trees,
has turned its mind in another direction. Apparently very
fearful, very sensitive, it avoids visits from bothersome and
cumbersome insects by tting out its stem with glandular
bristles whence oozes a viscous liquid in which so many
parasites get trapped that the peasants of the Midi use the
plant as a ycatcher in their homes. Moreover, certain kinds
of catchy have ingeniously simplied the system. Since it
is especially ants they dread, they have found that it sufces,
in order to prevent them passing by, to place a broad sticky
ring beneath the node of each stem. It is exactly what gar-
deners do when they mark a ring of tar around the trunk
of apple trees to prevent the ascent of caterpillars.
This will lead us to study the means of defense in
plants. M. Henri Coupin, in an excellent popular text, The
Original Plants, to which I refer the reader desirous of fur-
ther details, examines some of these strange armaments.
18
First of all there is the intriguing matter of thorns, upon
which subject a student at the Sorbonne, M. Lothelier,
has carried out some very interesting experiments, which
prove that shade and humidity tend to suppress the prickly
parts of plants. On the other hand, the more arid and sun-
baked the spot where it grows, the more the plant bristles
and multiplies its spikes, as if it understood that being al-
most the sole survivor of the bare rocks or the scorching
sand it must redouble its efforts to defend itself against an
enemy that no longer has any choice of prey. Furthermore,
it is noticeable that, when grown by man, the majority of
thorny plants gradually discard their weapons, giving over
the task of their salvation to the supernatural guardian who
adopts them in his garden.*
Certain plants, among others the borages, replace the
thorns with very stiff bristles. Others, like the nettle, add
poison to them. Yet others, the geranium, the mint, the
rue, etc., impregnate themselves with strong odors to fend
*Among the plants that have given up defending themselves, the most
striking case is that of the lettuce. In the wild, as the aforementioned
author puts it, if one breaks a stem or a leaf, one sees a white sap escape
it, latex, a substance formed from various elements that vigorously defend
the plant from attack by slugs. On the contrary, in the cultivated species
deriving from the former, there is barely any latex; thus the plant, to the
great despair of gardeners, is no longer capable of ghting and lets itself get
eaten by slugs. It is worth adding, however, that this latex is hardly ever
lacking in other than young plants, instead of which it becomes abundant
again when the lettuce begins to form a head and when it runs to seed.
So it is at the beginning of its life, at the budding of its rst and tender
leaves, that it will experience the greatest difculty in defending itself. We
might say that the cultivated lettuce somewhat loses its head, if you will
excuse the expression, and no longer quite knows where it stands.
19
off animals. But the strangest of all are those that defend
themselves mechanically. I shall but mention the horse-
tail, which surrounds itself with a veritable armor of mi-
croscopic grains of silica. Moreover, nearly all the grasses
add lime to their tissues to discourage the voraciousness of
slugs and snails.
X
Before touching on the study of the complex devices that
cross-fertilization requires, among the thousands of nup-
tial ceremonies going on in our gardens, let us mention
the ingenious ideas of some very simple owers wherein
spouses are born, fall in love, and die in one and the same
corolla. We are familiar enough with the type of system:
the stamens* or male organs, generally frail and numer-
ous, set themselves up around the robust and patient pistil.
Mariti et uxores uno eodemque thalamo gaudent [Husbands
and wives delight in one and the same bed], as Linnaeus
so beautifully puts it. But the disposition, form, and habits
*At the beginning of this study, which could become the golden book of
oral nuptials (the responsibility for which I leave to a greater expert than
myself), there is perhaps a point in calling the readers attention to the faulty,
disconcerting terminology used in botany to specify the reproductive
organs of plants. In the female organ, the pistil, which includes the ovary,
the style, and the stigma which crowns it, all is of masculine gender and all
seems virile. On the other hand the male organs, the stamens that top the
anthers, have a young girls name. It is just as well to get this antimony clear
in the mind once and for all.
20
of these organs vary from ower to ower, as if nature had
an idea that could not yet be determined or an imagina-
tion that makes a point of honor of never repeating itself.
Often the ripened pollen falls quite naturally from the top
of the stamens onto the pistil, but quite often too, pistil and
stamens are of the same size, or the latter are too long, or
the pistil is twice their size. Endless attempts to meet up
then occur. Sometimes, as in the nettle, the stamens, at the
bottom of the corolla, stand cowering on their stem. At
the moment of fertilization, the stem slackens like a spring,
and the anther or pollen sac that tops it shoots a cloud of
dust over the stigma. Sometimes, as in the barberry, so that
the nuptials only occur during the best hours of a ne
day, the stamens, distanced from the pistil, are held against
the walls of the ower by the weight of two moist glands;
the sun appears, evaporates the liquid, and the unburdened
stamens fall on the stigma. Elsewhere it differs: thus in the
primrose the females are by turns longer or smaller than
the males. In the lily, tulip, etc., the spouse, too slender, does
what she can to gather and concentrate the pollen. But the
most original and fantastic system is that of the rue (Ruta
graveolens), a quite foul-smelling medicinal herb, of the
disreputable group of emmenagogues. The stamens, still
and docile in the yellow corolla, wait, lined up in a circle
around the large squat pistil. At the nuptial hour, obeying
an order from the female, who seems to make a kind of
nominal appeal, one of the males approaches and touches
the stigma, followed by the third, the fth, the seventh, and
the ninth male until the whole odd row is done. Then, in
21
the even row, it is the turn of the second, the fourth, the
sixth, etc. It is truly love on demand. This ower that can
count seemed so extraordinary to me that I did not at rst
believe the botanists and tried more than once to verify its
sense of number before conrming it. I have noticed that
it rarely makes a mistake.
It would be overdoing it to multiply these examples. A
simple stroll through eld or wood will permit a thousand
observations of this point quite as curious as those that the
botanists report. But before bringing this section to a close,
I must insist on pointing out one more ower; not that it
bears witness to a truly extraordinary imagination, but for
the delightful and easily perceptible grace of its gesture
of love. It is the fennel ower (Nigella damascena) whose
common names have a certain charm: love-in-a-mist,
devil-in-the-bush, beauty-with-owing-locks, etc.such
bold and touching efforts of popular poetry to describe a
little plant it likes. We nd this plant growing wild in the
Midi, at the roadside and beneath the olives, and further
north it is often found growing in rather old-fashioned
gardens. The ower is of a delicate blue, simple like a pri-
mal oweret, and the owing locks are the intertwined
leaves, slender and light, that surround the corolla with a
bush of diaphanous foliage. At the source of the ower,
the ve extremely long pistils stand tightly grouped in the
center of the sky-blue crown, like ve queens clothed in
green gowns, haughty and inaccessible. Around them in a
countless crowd gather their hopeless lovers, the stamens,
which fail even to come up to their knees. Then at the
22
heart of this palace of turquoises and sapphires, in the bliss
of a summers day, begins the silent unending drama, that
of an impotent, useless, static waiting. But hours go by,
years in the life of the ower; its glory fades, its petals fall,
and the arrogance of the great queens appears nally to
be sinking beneath the weight of life. At a given moment,
as if they were obeying a secret and irresistible word of
love that deems the test sufcient, all of them together
lean backward in a concerted and symmetrical movement,
comparable to the harmonious parabolas of a ve-pronged
fountain falling back into its basin, and come gracefully
to take, from the lips of their humble suitors, the golden
powder of the nuptial kiss.
XI
As we see, the unexpected abounds here. A great book,
therefore, is waiting to be written on the intelligence of
plants, as Romanes did on the intelligence of animals. But
this brief sketch is by no means intended to become a
manual of that kind; I wish merely to draw attention to
several interesting events taking place around us in this
world wherein we believe ourselves rather too vainly to be
the privileged ones. These events have not been carefully
selected but are offered as simple examples from random
observations and circumstances. Moreover, in these brief
notes I try to concern myself above all with the ower, for
in it shines forth the greatest wonders. For the time being I
23
am omitting carnivorous owerssundews, various kinds
of pitcher plants, etc., that border on the animal kingdom
and would require a special, elaborate studyto concen-
trate on the ower in the true sense of the word, on that
which we consider insentient and inanimate.
So as to separate facts from theories, let us speak
of the ower as if it had foreseen and conceived of its
achievement in a human way. We shall see later what it
must still be credited with and what ought to be taken
away from it. For the moment there it is alone onstage,
like a magnicent princess endowed with reason and will.
We cannot deny that it seems to have been thus imbued;
to strip it of those attributes we must turn to extremely
vague hypotheses. So there it is, immobile on its stem, shel-
tering the reproductive organs of the plant in a dazzling
tabernacle. It seems as if it has only to let itself accomplish
the mysterious union of stamens and pistil in the heart
of this tabernacle of love. And many owers allow this to
happen. But for many others a terrible threat looms large,
posing the generally insoluble problem of cross-fertiliza-
tion. Following what countless and forgotten experiments
have they recognized that self-fertilization, that is to say
fertilization of the stigma by pollen fallen from the anthers
surrounding it in the same corolla, brings with it the rapid
degeneration of the species? They have recognized noth-
ing, nor proted from any experiment, we are told. The
force of things simply and gradually has eliminated seeds
and plants weakened by self-fertilization. Soon only those
survived in which some kind of anomalyfor instance,
24
the exaggerated length of the pistil being inaccessible to
the anthersprevented them from fertilizing themselves.
These exceptions being the only ones to survive a thou-
sand strange incidents, heredity nally arranged for chance
to do its work, and the normal type disappeared.
XII
Further on we shall see what these explanations reveal.
For the moment let us go out again into the garden or
the open countryside, in order to study more closely two
or three unusual inventions of the owers genius. And al-
ready, without straying far from the house, here, haunted
by bees, is a fragrant cluster inhabited by a highly skilled
mechanic. No one, not even the least countried of us,
can fail to be acquainted with the wholesome sage. An
unpretentious labiate, it bears a very modest ower that
opens vigorously, like a starving gob, to grab the sunrays
as they pass by. Moreover, a great number of varieties ex-
ist, whichcurious detail, thishave not all adopted or
brought to the same perfection the system of fertilization
we are about to examine.
But I shall only concern myself here with the most
common form of sage, that one at present, as if to celebrate
the rite of spring, covering every wall of my olive-tree ter-
races with violet drapery. I can assure you that the balconies
of great marble palaces, where kings are expected to appear,
have never been more happily, luxuriously, or fragrantly
25
adorned. We almost imagine catching the scents from the
light of the sun at its height, when midday strikes.
To go into detail, the stigma or female organ of the
ower is enclosed in the upper lip, which forms a kind of
hood, where the two stamens or male organs are also to be
found. In order to prevent them fertilizing the stigma that
shares the same nuptial pavilion, this stigma is twice their
length, so that they have no hope of reaching it. Further-
more, to avoid any accidents, the ower has made itself
protandrous, that is to say, the stamens ripen before the
pistil, so when the female is ready to conceive, the males
have already disappeared. An external force must therefore
intervene to accomplish the union by transporting a for-
eign pollen to the abandoned stigma. A certain number of
owers, the anemophilous ones, leave this task to the wind.
But the sageand this is the more general caseis ento-
mophilous, that is to say, it loves insects and relies solely
on their collaboration. Moreover, it is fully awarefor it
knows plenty of thingsof living in a world where it pays
not to expect any sympathy, any charitable act. So it does
not waste its time in making useless appeals to the indul-
gence of the bee. The bee, like everything that struggles
against death on this earth, lives only for itself and its own
kind, and is quite unconcerned to render service to the
owers that sustain it. How then to force it, despite itself,
or at least without its knowledge, to carry out its matri-
monial duty? Here then is the superb love trap conjured
up by the sage: right at the back of its tent of violet silk, it
distils a few drops of nectar; that is the bait. But blocking
26
the ow of the sugary liquid are two parallel stems that
stand upright rather like the shafts of a Dutch drawbridge.
At the very tip of each stem is a large blister, the anther,
teeming with pollen; below, two smaller blisters serve as
counterweights. When the bee enters the ower, in order
to get at the nectar, it has to push the small blisters with
its head. The two stems, which pivot on an axis, suddenly
topple, and the upper anthers come into contact with the
sides of the insect, covering them in pollen dust.
As soon as the bee has left, the spring pivots return
the mechanism to its original position, and everything is
ready to go again on the next visit.
However, that is only part one of the drama: the se-
quel unfolds in another setting. In a neighboring ower,
where the stamens have just wilted, the pistil awaiting pol-
len enters the stage. It slowly issues from the hood, elon-
gates itself, leans over, curves downward, and forks, in its
turn blocking entry to the pavilion. Going for the nectar,
the head of the bee passes freely beneath the hanging fork,
but this fork scuffs the bees back and sides, exactly at the
points where the stamens touch. The double-cleft stigma
greedily absorbs the silvery dust and the impregnation goes
ahead. Furthermore, by introducing into the ower a piece
of straw or the tip of a matchstick, it is easy to get the
device to stir and to realize the striking and marvelous
combination and precision of all its movements.
The varieties of sage are numerous, about ve hun-
dred in all, and I shall spare you most of their scientic
names which are seldom elegant: Salvia pratensis, ofcinalis
27
(the one in our vegetable plots), horminum, horminoides, glu-
tinosa, sclarea, roemeri, azurea, pitcheri, splendens (the magni-
cent scarlet sage of our hanging baskets), etc. Perhaps there
is not a single one that has not modied in some detail
the device we have just examined. Someand this is, I
believe, a dubious improvementhave doubled, occasion-
ally tripled the length of the pistil, in such a way that it not
only emerges from the hood, but curves upward in a full
plume in front of the entrance to the ower. Thus they
avoid the faint danger of fertilization of the stigma by the
anthers located within the same hood, but on the contrary,
it may happen that if the protandry be inexact, the bee, on
leaving the ower, deposits on the stigma the pollen of the
very anthers with which the stigma coexists. Others, in the
leveraging movement, make the anthers diverge further,
and in this way they strike the sides of the creature with
greater certainty. Others, nally, have failed yet to arrange
and adjust all the parts of the device. I nd, for instance,
not far from my violet sage, close by the well, beneath a
cluster of oleanders, a family of white owers tinted with
pale lilac. There we nd neither plan for nor sign of a lever.
The stamens and the stigma haphazardly clutter the cen-
ter of the corolla. Everything there seems disorganized
and given over to chance. I do not doubt it is possible,
for those who collect the many varieties of this labiate, to
piece together the whole history, to follow all the stages
of invention, from the primal disorder of the white sage I
am looking at now to the latest perfections of the medici-
nal sage. What does this all mean? Is the system still being
28
developed by the aromatic tribe? Are we still in the phase
of ne tuning and testing, as with the Archimedean screw
in the sainfoin family? Have we still to acknowledge unan-
imously the excellence of the automatic lever? All there-
fore not being immutable or preordained, would one be
arguing and experimenting in a world we deemed fatally,
organically habitual?*
XIII
Be that as it may, the ower of most varieties of sage
offers an attractive solution to the great problem of cross-
fertilization. But just as, among men, a new invention is
immediately taken up, simplied, improved by a crowd of
indefatigable minor researchers, so in what we might call
the mechanical world of owers, the patent of the sage has
been worked out and, in many respects, strangely perfected.
*For several years now I have been carrying out a series of experiments
with the hybridization of the sage, articially fertilizing, after the customary
precautions to exclude any intervention by the wind or by insects, a variety
whose oral mechanism has reached a high state of perfection, with the
pollen of a highly retrograde variety, and vice versa. My observations are
not yet sufciently numerous for me to go into detail here. Nonetheless,
it seems that a general law already begins to emerge from them, namely,
that the retrograde sage willingly adopts the improvements of the advanced
variety, rather than the latter assuming the defects of the former. In this we
get a curious enough glimpse into natures procedures, habits, preferences,
and taste for the very best. But these experiments are inevitably slow and
lengthy because of the time taken in gathering the different varieties, in
making necessary checks and double checks, etc. It would therefore be
premature to draw the slightest conclusion from them.
29
A fairly ordinary member of the wort family, the small louse-
wort (Pedicularis sylvatica), which you have surely come across
in the shady parts of copses and heaths, has brought some
extremely ingenious modications to the process. The form
of the corolla is just about the same as that of the sage; the
stigma and the two anthers are located all three in the upper
hood. Only the small moist tip of the stigma overshoots the
hood, while the anthers remain total captives within. In this
silken tabernacle, the organs of the two sexes are cramped
together and even in direct contact; nonetheless, thanks to a
system quite different to that of the sage, self-fertilization is
totally impossible. In fact, the anthers form two blisters lled
with powder; these blisters, each of which has only one
opening, are juxtaposed in such a way that if these openings
coincide, they mutually close each other off. They are forc-
ibly kept within the hood, on their folded, springy stems, by
two kinds of teeth. The bee or bumblebee that goes into the
ower to draw the nectar from it must open up these teeth;
as soon as they are freed, the blisters shoot up, fall outside,
and drop upon the insects back.
But the genius and foresight of the ower does not
stop there. As H. Mller points out, being the rst to study
in full the prodigious mechanism of the lousewort:
If the stamens were to strike the insect while retaining
their relative positions, not one single grain of pollen
would emerge, since their orices close each other off.
But a device as simple as it is ingenious resolves the
problem. The lower lip of the corolla, instead of being
symmetrical and horizontal, is irregular and slanting,
30
so that one side is several millimeters higher than the
other. The bumblebee positioned on it must also be
leaning. Its head consequently strikes the projections
of the corolla one after another. Thus the release of the
stamens occurs in succession as well, so that rst one,
then the other, their orices freed, strikes the insect
and sprinkles it with the fertilizing dust.
When the bumblebee then passes to another ow-
er, it inevitably fertilizes it, forthis is a detail purposely
omittedwhat it encounters at the very rst moment
of pushing its head into the entrance of the corolla is
the stigma, which brushes it right at the spot where it
goes a moment later to be marked by the impact of the
stamens, at that exact spot where it has already been
touched by the stamens of the ower it has just left.
XIV
We might multiply these examples indenitely, each ow-
er having its idea, its system, its acquired experience that it
turns to advantage. In examining closely their little inven-
tions, their various procedures, we recall those tremendous
exhibitions of machine tools, where the mechanical genius
of man reveals its range of resources. But our mechanical
genius dates from yesterday, whereas oral mechanics have
been working for thousands of years. When owers rst
appeared on this earth, they had no models around them to
imitate; they had to come up with everything from within
themselves. From a time when we were still waving clubs,
aiming bows, swinging ails, to fairly recent times when
31
we thought up the spinning wheel, the pulley, the hoist,
the ramrod; at the timeit was last year, so to speak
when our masterpieces were the catapult, the clock, and
the loom, the sage had fashioned the pivoting shafts and
counterweights of its precise swing, and the lousewort its
blisters sealed off as though for a scientic experiment, its
repeatedly triggering springs, and its scheme of inclined
planes. Who then, less than one hundred years ago, had
any idea of the properties of the screw that the maple and
the lime have used since the birth of trees? When will we
reach the stage of fashioning a parachute or a ying ma-
chine as rm, as light, as subtle and as safe as that of the
dandelion? When will we discover the secret of carving in
a material as fragile as the silk of petals a spring as power-
ful as that which hurls into space the golden pollen of the
Spanish broom? And as for the balsam apple or squirting
cucumber, whose name I gave at the beginning of this
little study, who will tell us the mystery of its miraculous
strength? Do you know the balsam? It is a humble cu-
curbit, found all along the Mediterranean coast. Its eshy
fruit, which resembles a small cucumber, is endowed with
inexplicable vitality and energy. You have but to touch it,
at the moment of its maturity, for it to detach itself sud-
denly from its peduncle in a convulsive contraction and
to shoot through the opening created by the wrench,
mingled with many seeds, a mucilaginous jet of such ex-
ceptional force that it carries the seed four or ve meters
away from the natal plant. The action is as extraordinary
as if we had succeeded, relatively speaking, in emptying
32
ourselves in one spasmodic movement and had shot all
our organs, innards, and blood half a kilometer from our
skin and skeleton. Furthermore, a large number of seeds
make use of ballistic methods and sources of energy that
remain more or less unknown to us. Recall, for instance,
the cracking report of the rape and the broom. But one
of the great masters of vegetal artillery is the spurge. The
spurge is an indigenous euphorbiate, a huge and decora-
tive weed that often surpasses a man in size. Right now
I have on my table a branch of spurge steeping in a glass
of water. It bears triple-cleft, greenish berries that enclose
the seeds. From time to time one of these berries bursts
with a loud report, and the seeds, gifted with a prodigious
initial velocity, strike the furniture and walls on every side.
If one of them hits you in the face, you would think you
had been stung by an insect, such is the extraordinary pen-
etrative force of these tiny seeds of pinhead size. Examine
the berry, look for the springs that move it, but you will
not nd the secret of this force; it is as invisible as that of
our nerves. The Spanish broom (Spartium junceum) has not
only pods but spring-loaded owers too. Perhaps you have
noticed this admirable plant. It is the nest representative
of that powerful family of brooms, ercely clinging to life,
poor, sober, robust, dreading no earth, no challenge. Along
the pathways and in the mountains of the Midi, it forms
huge tufted balls, occasionally three meters high, which,
between May and June, are covered with a magnicent
bloom of pure gold. Its scents, mingling with those of its
regular neighbor, the honeysuckle, spread beneath the fury
33
of a harsh sun such delights that can be dened only by
evoking celestial dews, Elysian springs, the freshness and
limpidity of stars in the depth of blue grottoes.
The ower of this broom, like that of all the papili-
onaceous Leguminosae, resembles the ower of our garden
pea; its lower petals, welded together like a galleys ram,
hermetically seal the stamens and the pistil. As long as it
remains unripe, the exploring bee nds it impenetrable.
But as soon as the moment of puberty arrives for the cap-
tive ancs, the ram bends under the weight of the alight-
ing insect, and the golden chamber explodes voluptuously,
propelling far and wide, with great force, over the visitor,
over the nearby owers, a cloud of luminous dust, which a
broad petal arranged as a canopy casts down, with an ex-
cess of caution, upon the stigma to be impregnated.
XV
I refer those who may care to study all these problems to
the works of Christian Konrad Sprengel, who was the rst,
in his unusual work, The Secret of Nature Revealed (1793),
to analyze the functions of the different organs in orchids;
then to the books of Charles Darwin, H. Mller of Lipp-
stadt, Hildebrand, Delpino the Italian, Sir William Hooker,
Robert Brown, and many others.
We shall nd the most perfect and most harmoni-
ous manifestations of plant intelligence among the orchids.
In these strange and convoluted owers, the genius of the
34
plant attains its highest point and with an unusual brilliance
pierces the wall that divides the kingdoms. Moreover, we
must not allow this name orchid to mislead us to believe
that this concerns only rare and precious owers, those
queens of the hothouse that seem to claim the attention of
the goldsmith rather than the gardener. Our wild, indig-
enous ora, including all our modest weeds, comprise
more than twenty-ve species of orchid, among which we
nd the most ingenious and most complicated specimens.
It is these which Charles Darwin studied in his book, On
the Fertilization of Orchids by Insects, which is the amazing
history of the most heroic efforts of the soul of the ower.
There is absolutely no question of summarizing here, in a
few lines, this prolic and magical biography. Nonetheless,
since we are concerned with the intelligence of owers, it
is necessary to give a general idea of the mental processes
and habits of that which surpasses all others in the art of
compelling the bee or the buttery to do exactly what it
wants, in the form and time prescribed.
XVI
Without drawings it is not easy to get you to understand
the extraordinarily complex mechanism of the orchid.
I shall try anyway to give a general idea of it with the
aid of more or less approximate comparisons, while
avoiding as far as possible the use of technical terms
such as retinaculum, labellum, rostellum, etc., which give
35
rise to no specic image in the minds of those unfamil-
iar with botany.
Let us take one of the most widespread orchids in
our regions, the Orchis maculata, for instance, or rather, for
it is a little larger and thus easier to observe, the Orchis lati-
folia, the broad-leaved Orchis, commonly called Whitsun-
tide ower. It is a perennial plant reaching thirty to sixty
centimeters in height, commonly enough found in woods
and water meadows, and bearing a thyrse of little pinkish
owers that bloom in May and June.
The typical ower of our orchids represents fairly
precisely a fantastic and open-mouthed Chinese dragons
head. The highly elongated and hanging lower lip, in the
form of a toothed or jagged apron, serves as a base or rest-
ing place for the insect. The upper lip rounds in a kind of
hood that shelters the vital organs; while behind the ower,
beside the peduncle, drops a kind of prow or long pointed
horn that contains the nectar. In most owers, the stigma
or female organ is a small and fairly sticky tuft that awaits
the coming of the pollen patiently, at the end of a fragile
stem. In the orchid, this classic installation has grown un-
recognizable. Deep inside the mouth, at the spot occupied
in the throat by the uvula, we nd two tightly welded
stigmas, above which rises a third stigma modied into an
extraordinary organ. At its top it carries a kind of pouch,
or more precisely, a kind of stoup known as the rostellum.
This stoup is full of a sticky uid in which soak two tiny
pellets whence emerge two short stems laden at their tops
with a meticulously tied up packet of pollen grains.
36
Let us see now what happens when an insect enters
the ower. It alights on the lower lip outspread to receive
it and, drawn by the scent of the nectar, tries to get at
the horn that contains it deep within. But by design, the
way through is very narrow, and as it moves forward, the
insects head cannot avoid striking the stoup. Immediately
this stoup, sensitive to the slightest blow, tears open along
a convenient line, exposing the two pellets coated with
sticky uid. On making direct contact with the visitors
skull, these pellets attach themselves to it and stick solidly,
so that, when the insect leaves the ower, it carries them
away and, with them, the two stems they support ending
in the tied-up packets of pollen. So there we have the
insect capped with two upright horns in the shape of a
champagne bottle. Unconscious artisan of difcult work,
it next visits a neighboring ower. If its horns remain stiff,
they will simply strike with their pollen packets those oth-
er packets whose feet are soaking in the watchful stoup,
and nothing will issue from the mingling of pollens. Here
the genius, experience, and foresight of the orchid stand
out. It has calculated down to the last second the time
required by the insect to suck the nectar and move to
the next ower, and it has gured this out to be on aver-
age a thirty-second interval. We have seen that the pack-
ets of pollen are borne on two short stems inserted into
the sticky pellets; now, at the point of insertion, we nd,
beneath each stem, a small membranous disk whose sole
function is, after thirty seconds, to contract and to fold
each of these stems, so that they describe a ninety-degree
37
arc. It is the result of a fresh calculation, on this occasion
not in time, but in space. The two horns of pollen that cap
the nuptial messenger are now horizontal and pointing in
front of its head, so that, when it enters the next ower,
they will strike precisely against the two welded stigmas
beneath the overhanging stoup.
That is not all, and the genius of the orchid has not
yet exhausted its foresight. The stigma that takes the blow
from the pollen packet is coated with a sticky substance.
If this substance were as thoroughly adhesive as that con-
tained by the stoup, the pollen mass, its stems broken,
would get totally stuck in it and would remain xed there,
and its destiny would be complete. That must not be; it is
vital that the pollens chances be not exhausted in a single
venture, but rather be multiplied to the maximum extent.
The ower that counts the seconds and measures the lines
is even a chemist as well and distils two types of gum:
one extremely adhesive and which hardens immediately
on contact with air, in order to glue the pollen horns to
the insects head, the other greatly diluted, for the work
of the stigma. This latter is just tacky enough to unravel
or slightly disturb the taut and elastic threads that envelop
the pollen grains. Some of these grains stick to it, but the
pollen mass is not destroyed, and when the insect goes on
to visit other owers, it will continue its fertilizing work
almost indenitely.
Have I expounded the entire miracle? No, we must
still attend to many neglected details, among others, the
movement of the little stoup, which after its membrane
38
has split to unveil the sticky pellets, immediately lifts up its
lower side in order to keep in good condition in the liquid
glue the pollen packet that the insect may not have carried
off. There is every reason to note also the very unusually
combined divergence of the pollen stems on the insects
head, as well as certain chemical precautions common to
all plants, for very recent experiments by Gaston Bonnier
seem to prove that every ower, in order to keep its species
intact, secretes toxins that destroy or sterilize any foreign
pollen. That is just about all we can see, but here, as in
everything, the really great miracle begins where our gaze
comes to an end.
XVII
I have just now found, in a wild corner of the olive grove,
a superb head of lizard orchid (Loroglossum hircinum), a va-
riety that, for no apparent reason (perhaps it is extremely
rare in England), Darwin has not studied. Of all our indig-
enous orchids, it is undoubtedly the most remarkable, most
fantastic, most astonishing. If it had the size of an American
orchid, we could conrm that no more fanciful plant ex-
ists. Imagine a thyrse, along the lines of the hyacinth, but a
little taller. It is symmetrically adorned with vicious three-
cornered owers of a greenish white stippled with pale vi-
olet. The lower petal, decorated at its source with bronzed
caruncles, with Merovingian mustaches, and with ominous
lilac buboes, extends endlessly, crazily, improbably, in the
39
shape of a twirled ribbon, of the color of a drowned person
whose corpse has been in a river for a month. The whole
thing, which conjures up an impression of the worst ill-
nesses and seems to blossom in heaven knows which lands
of ironic nightmares and evil spells, gives off an awful stink,
as of a billy goat, which spreads far and wide revealing the
presence of the monster. I am indicating and describing
this foul-smelling orchid in this way, because it is common
enough in France, is easily recognizable, and lends itself
very well, on account of its size and the distinctness of its
organs, to the experiments we wish to do with it. In fact,
we need only insert the tip of a matchstick into the ower,
pushing it carefully to the bottom of the nectary, in order
to view, with the naked eye, all the stages of fertilization.
Grazed along the way, the pouch or rostellum drops down,
revealing a small sticky disk (the lizard orchid has but one)
that supports the two pollen stems. The moment this disk
violently clutches the tip of the wood, the two boxes that
enclose the pollen pellets open lengthwise, and when we
retract the matchstick, its tip is solidly capped by two stiff
and diverging horns, each ending in a golden ball. Unfor-
tunately, we cannot enjoy here, as in the experiment with
the Orchis latifolia, the charming spectacle offered by the
precise and gradual leaning of the two horns. Why do
they not drop down at all? It sufces to push the capped
matchstick into a nearby nectary to conrm the superu-
ousness of this movement, the ower being much larger
than that of the Orchis maculata or latifolia and the nectar
horn placed in such a way that, when the insect laden
40
with pollen enters it, this mass arrives exactly at the level
of the stigma to be impregnated.
Let us add that it is vital to the success of the experi-
ment to choose a fully ripened ower. We do not know
when this is the case, but the insect and the ower know,
for the latter does not invite its necessary guests, by of-
fering them a drop of nectar, until its entire apparatus is
ready to work.
XVIII
There we have the basis of the fertilization system adopted
by our indigenous orchids. But each species, each family,
modies it, perfects its details according to its own expe-
rience, psychology, and special preferences. The Orchis or
Anacamptis pyramidalis, for instance, one of the most intel-
ligent, has added to its lower lip or labellum two small
ridges that guide the proboscis of the insect toward the
nectar and compel it to accomplish everything expected
of it. Darwin quite rightly compares this ingenious acces-
sory to the instrument we use sometimes to guide a thread
through the eye of a needle. Another interesting improve-
ment: the two little pellets that carry the pollen stems and
soak in the stoup are replaced by a single sticky disk, in the
form of a saddle. If, following the path to be taken by the
insects proboscis, we insert a needle point or a hogs bristle
into the ower, we see very clearly the advantages of this
simpler and more practical device. As soon as the bristle has
41
brushed the stoup, the latter breaks along a symmetrical
line, revealing the saddle-shaped disk, which immediately
attaches itself to the bristle. Pull this bristle out quickly
and you will have just enough time to catch the attractive
action of the saddle which, seated on the bristle or needle,
folds its two lower wings in such a way as to grip tightly
the object supporting it. The purpose of this movement
is to strengthen the adhesive power of the saddle and es-
pecially to ensure more exactly than in the broad-leaved
orchid the necessary divergence of the pollen stems. As
soon as the saddle has hugged the bristle and as the stems
planted in it, drawn apart by its contraction, forcibly di-
verge, the second movement of the stems begins with a
leaning toward the tip of the bristle, in the same way as in
the orchid we studied earlier. These two combined move-
ments are completed in thirty to thirty-four seconds.
XIX
Is it not exactly in this way, by tries, by repetitions, by
successive alterations, that human inventions progress? We
have all been following, in the latest of our mechanical in-
dustries, the minute but nonstop improvements in ignition,
in carburetion, in clutch mechanism, in gear transmission.
We could truly say that ideas come to owers in the same
way they come to us. Flowers grope in the same darkness,
encounter the same obstacles and the same ill will, in the
same unknown. They know the same laws, same disap-
42
pointments, same slow and difcult triumphs. It seems they
have our patience, our perseverance, our self-love; the same
nely tuned and diversied intelligence, almost the same
hopes and the same ideals. Like ourselves, they struggle
against a vast indifferent force that ends by helping them.
Their inventive imagination follows not only the same
cautious and painstaking methods, the same tiresome little
pathways, narrow and twisting, but also takes unexpected
leaps forward that suddenly nalize an uncertain brain-
wave. It is thus that a family of great inventors among the
orchids, a rich and strange American family, the Catasetidae,
abruptly overturned with a daring idea a number of habits
that doubtless seemed to it too primitive. First of all, the
separation of the sexes is absolute; each has its own special
ower. Next, the pollen complex, or mass or packet of pol-
len, no longer soaks its stem in a stoup full of gum, lying in
wait there, a little inertly and in any case stripped of initia-
tive, for the stroke of luck that will attach it to the insects
head. It is folded back on a powerful spring in a kind of
cell. Nothing special attracts the insect to this cell. Nor
have the superb Catasetidae reckoned, like the common or-
chids, on this or that movement of the visitor; a controlled
and precise movement, if you will, but nonetheless one by
chance. No, the insect no longer enters a mere admirably
engineered ower, but an animated and literally sensitive
one. Barely has it placed itself on the magnicent forecourt
of bronzed silk than long and nervous feelers, that it cannot
avoid brushing, sound the alarm throughout the edice.
The cellwherein the pollen mass, split into two packets,
43
has been held captive on its folded pedicle supported by
a large sticky diskis immediately torn asunder. Abruptly
released, the pedicle straightens like a spring, pulling along
with it the two pollen packets and the sticky disk, which
are violently ejected. Following a curious ballistic calcula-
tion, the disk is always launched rst, and strikes the insect,
adhering to it. Stunned by the blow, the insect thinks only
of escaping the aggressive corolla as quickly as possible and
taking refuge in a nearby ower. That is exactly what the
American orchid had in mind.
XX
Shall I also point out the curious and practical simplica-
tions that another family of exotic orchids, the Cypripede-
ae, introduces into the general system? Let us remember
the circumvolutions of human inventions; we have here
an amusing counterproof. A tter in the workshop, a stu-
dent assistant in the laboratory, says one day to his supe-
rior: What if we just try to do the opposite? What if we
reverse the movement? What if we invert the mixture of
uids? We try the experiment, and from the unexpected
the unknown suddenly issues. It would not be too hard to
believe that the Cypripedeae have held similar discussions
among themselves. We all know the Cypripedium or ladys
slipper; with its huge jutting chin, its erce and venom-
ous demeanor, it is the most characteristic of our hothouse
owers, the one that seems to us to be the typical orchid,
44
so to speak. The Cypripedium has boldly suppressed the en-
tire delicate and complicated device of the spring-loaded
pollen packets, the diverging stems, etc. Its clog-like chin
and a sterile, shield-shaped anther block the entrance in
such a way as to compel the insect to pass its proboscis
over two small heaps of pollen. But this is not the cru-
cial point; the entirely unexpected and abnormal fact is
that, contrary to what we have established in all the other
species, it is no longer the stigma, the female organ, that
is sticky, but the pollen itself. Its grains, instead of being
pulverulent, are covered with a coating so glutinous that
it may be stretched and drawn out in strings. What are the
advantages and drawbacks of this new arrangement? We
might fear that the pollen transported by the insect will
become attached to any other object but the stigma; on
the other hand, the stigma is exempt from secreting the
uid destined to sterilize all foreign pollen. In any case,
this problem would require a special study. In the same
way, there are patents whose usefulness is not immediately
apparent to us.
XXI
To nish with this strange tribe of orchids, it remains only
for me to say a few words about a secondary organ that sets
the whole mechanism going: I mean the nectary. It has for
that matter been the object, on the part of the genius of
the species, of research, of endeavors, and of experiments as
45
intelligent and as varied as those that endlessly modify the
economy of the vital organs.
The nectary, as we have seen, is in principle a kind of
long prow, a long pointed horn that opens up deep in the
bottom of the ower, beside the peduncle, and acts more
or less as a counterpoise to the corolla. It contains a sugary
uid, the nectar, which feeds butteries, beetles, and other
insects and which is made into honey by the bee.
Its responsibility therefore is to attract the indispens-
able guests. It has conformed to their size, their habits, their
tastes; it is always placed so that they cannot insert or with-
draw their proboscis without scrupulously and successively
performing all the rituals prescribed by the organic laws of
the ower.
We already know enough about the whimsical char-
acter and imagination of the orchids to foresee that here,
as elsewhereand even more than elsewhere, for the more
exible organ lends itself much better to this tasktheir
inventive, practical, perceptive, and nicky spirit is given
free rein. One of them, for instance, the Sarcanthus teretifolius,
probably failing to develop a sticky uid that would harden
quickly enough to stick the pollen packet to the insects
head, has solved the problem by taking pains to detain as
long as possible the proboscis of the visitor within the nar-
row passages leading to the nectar. The labyrinth it has plot-
ted is so complex that Bauer, Darwins skillful illustrator, had
to admit defeat and abandon his effort to reproduce it.
There are some which, starting from the excellent
principle that all simplication is improvement, have
46
boldly done away with the nectar horn. They have replaced
it with various eshy outgrowths, strange and evidently
succulent, which the insects nibble. Need I add that these
outgrowths are always placed in such a way that the guest
who feasts on them cannot avoid setting the entire pollen
mechanism in motion?
XXII
But, without lingering over a thousand small and ex-
tremely varied ruses, let us end this fairy tale by studying
the lure of the Coryanthes macrantha. In fact, we no longer
quite know what kind of being we are dealing with. The
astonishing orchid has come up with this: its lower lip or
labellum forms a kind of large jar into which continually
fall drops of almost pure water, secreted by two horns lo-
cated above; when this jar is half-full, the water ows out
on one side via a drainpipe. All this hydraulic installation
is already quite remarkable, but here is where the un-
nerving, I might say almost devilish, aspect of the scheme
comes into play. The liquid secreted by the horns and
gathered in the satin bowl is not nectar and is in no way
meant to attract the insects; it has a much more delicate
mission, in the truly Machiavellian scheme of this strange
ower. The unsuspecting insects are tempted to enter
the trap by sugary scents diffused by the aforementioned
eshy outgrowths. These outgrowths are located above
47
the jar, in a kind of chamber with access via two lateral
openings. The big visiting beethe ower being huge,
it invariably seduces only the heaviest Hymenopterae, as if
the others felt some kind of shame in entering such vast
and sumptuous chambersthe big bee starts to nibble
the tasty caruncles. If it were alone, it would leave quietly
after its meal, without even brushing the jar of water, the
stigma, and the pollen; and none of the necessary things
would be done. But the wise orchid has been observing
life going on around it. It knows that bees form an in-
numerable, greedy, and busy people, who emerge in their
thousands when the sun is out, that all it takes for them to
come running en masse to the feast prepared beneath the
nuptial tent is a scent to thrill like a kiss on the thresh-
old of an opening ower. So here we have two or three
gatherers in the sugary chamber; the place is cramped,
the surfaces are slippery, the guests violent. They crowd
in, jostling one another, so much so that one of them
always ends up falling into the jar awaiting it beneath
the treacherous meal. There it nds an unexpected bath,
conscientiously wets its beautiful diaphanous wings, and
despite tremendous efforts, fails to take off again. The as-
tute ower watches for this. In order to get out of the
magical jar, only one opening exists, the drainpipe that
serves as an overow from the reservoir. It is precisely
wide enough to allow passage to the insect whose back
rst of all touches the sticky surface of the stigma, then
the viscid glands of the pollen mass that await it along
48
the vault. So it escapes, laden with the adhesive pow-
der, enters a nearby ower, where yet again the drama of
the meal, the crush, the fall, the bath, and the escape is
reenacted, and inevitably places the imported pollen in
contact with the greedy stigma.
Here then is a ower that knows and exploits the
passions of insects. We cannot simply claim that all this is
no more than many rather fanciful interpretations; no, the
facts come from precise and scientic observation, and it is
impossible to explain otherwise the use and arrangement
of the various organs of the ower. We must accept the
evidence. This incredible and efcient ruse is all the more
surprising in that here it aims not to satisfy the need to eat,
urgent and immediate, that stimulates the dullest witted
intelligences; it has in view only a distant ideal: the propa-
gation of the species.
But why, we shall ask, these fantastic complications
that serve in the end only to increase the dangers of
chance? Let us not rush to judge and reply. We know noth-
ing of the plants own reasons. Do we know the obstacles it
encounters in respect of logic and simplicity? Do we know
thoroughly even one of the organic laws of its existence
and growth? Someone seeing us from the heights of Mars
or Venus, as we strive to conquer the air, would wonder the
same: why those misshapen and monstrous machines, those
balloons, those airplanes, those parachutes, when it would
be so simple to imitate the birds by tting out the arms
with a pair of perfectly satisfactory wings?
49
XXIII
To these proofs of intelligence, mans rather puerile vanity
offers the traditional objection: yes, they create marvels,
but those marvels remain the same for ever. Each species,
each variety has its system and, throughout the genera-
tions, brings no noticeable improvement to it. It is very
true that since we have been observing them, that is to say
for about fty years, we have not seen the Coryanthes mac-
rantha or the Catasetidae perfect their trap; that is all we can
afrm, and it is truly insufcient. Have we even attempted
the most elementary experiments, and do we know what
the successive generations of our amazing soaking orchid
might do in a centurys time if placed in a different milieu
among strange insects? What is more, the names we give
to the orders, species, and varieties end up fooling us, and
so we create imaginary types we believe to be xed, when
in fact they are probably only the representatives of one
and the same ower, which continues to modify its organs
slowly in accordance with slow circumstances.
Flowers preceded insects upon this earth; when the
latter appeared, the ower had therefore to adapt an en-
tirely new mechanism to the habits of these unexpected
collaborators. This fact alone, geologically indisputable,
amid all that we do not know, is enough to establish evolu-
tion, and does not this rather vague word mean, in the nal
analysis, adaptation, modication, intelligent progress?
50
Moreover, it would be easy, without resorting to that
prehistoric event, to group together a large number of facts
showing that the faculty of adaptation and intelligent prog-
ress is not the exclusive domain of the human race. Without
going back over the detailed chapters I have devoted to this
subject in The Life of the Bee, I will simply recall two or three
topical details which are mentioned there. Bees, for instance,
invented the hive. In a wild and primitive state and in their
country of origin, they work in the open air. It is the uncer-
tainty, the inclemency of our northern seasons that inspired
them to seek shelter in the hollows of rocks or trees. This
stroke of genius restored the work of honey-gathering and
care of the brood nest to the thousands of workers formerly
immobilized around the honeycomb to maintain the neces-
sary heat. It is not uncommon, especially in the Midi, during
exceptionally mild summers, for them to revert to the tropi-
cal habits of their ancestors.*
*I had just written these lines, when M. E-L. Bouvier gave a paper at the
Academy of Sciences (Record of 7 May 1906) on the subject of two open-
air nestings veried in Paris, one in a Sophora japonica, the other in a horse
chestnut tree. The latter, balanced on a small branch comprising two forks
quite close to each other, was the more remarkable, on account of the
evident and intelligent adaptation to particularly difcult circumstances.
The bees [I quote the summary of M. de Parville in the science
section of Dbats, 31 May 1906] constructed supporting pillars and
had recourse to truly remarkable protective devices. They ended up
transforming the double fork of the chestnut tree into a solid ceiling.
Undoubtedly an ingenious human being would have done less well.
To protect themselves from the rain, they had installed enclo-
sures and wadding, and blinds against the sun. One can only get an
idea of the perfect industry of the bees by taking a close look at the
architecture of the two nestings which are now in the museum.
51
Another fact: transported to Australia or California,
our black bee completely changes its habits. Having
grown certain of endless summer and of owers nev-
er failing to appear, it lives, from the second or third
year onward, content to gather from day to day only
the honey and pollen necessary for daily consumption,
and its recent and reasoned observation supplanting its
hereditary experience, it makes no further provisions. In
connection with this, Bchner mentions a trait that also
proves adaptation to circumstances, not slow, ancient,
unconscious, and inevitable but immediate and intelli-
gent: on Barbados, amid reneries where they nd sugar
in abundance throughout the year, the bees wholly cease
their visits to owers.
Finally, let us recall the amusing contradiction the
bees gave to two learned English entomologists: Kirby and
Spence. Show us, they said, a single case where pres-
sure of circumstances has inspired them to substitute clay
or mortar for wax or propolis, and we will admit they are
capable of reasoning.
Barely had they expressed this rather arbitrary wish
than another naturalist, Andrew Knight, having smeared
the bark of certain trees with a kind of cement made
from wax and turpentine, observed that his bees com-
pletely gave up gathering propolis and used only the new
and unknown substance, which they found ready-made
and in abundance in the vicinity of their dwelling place.
What is more, in the practice of apiculture, when there is
a dearth of pollen, it is enough to supply the bees with a
52
few pinches of our for them to understand immediately
that this can offer them the same services and be utilized
in the same way as the dust of the anthers, although its
taste, smell, and color are totally different.
What I have just recalled concerning bees might, I
think, mutatis mutandis, be conrmed in the kingdom of
owers. It would probably be enough for the admirable
evolutionary effort of the numerous varieties of sage, for
example, to be subjected to some experiments and stud-
ied more methodically than I, a mere layman, am capable
of. Meanwhile, among quite a few other indications that
would be easy to collate, an unusual study of cereals by
Babinet tells us that certain plants, when transported far
from their habitual climate, observe the new circum-
stances and utilize them, exactly like the bees. Thus, in
the hottest regions of Asia, Africa, and America, where
the winter does not kill it annually, our wheat becomes
again what it originally must have been: a plant as pe-
rennial as grass. It remains green, reproduces at root and
no longer bears ears or grains. When, therefore, from its
tropical and original home, it came to acclimatize itself to
our icy lands, it must have needed to transform its habits
and invent a new method of multiplication. Babinet puts
it well: The organism of the plant, by an inconceivable
miracle, seemed to foresee the need of passing through
the grain stage, in order not to perish completely during
the harsh season.
53
XXIV
In any case, to put paid to the objection I spoke of earlier
and which has caused this long digression, it would be
enough to establish one single act of intelligent progress
outside mankind. But apart from the pleasure we take in
refuting an overly vain and outdated argument, this ques-
tion of the personal intelligence of owers, insects, or birds
is basically of little importance! Even if we say, concern-
ing the orchid and the bee alike, that it is nature and not
the plant or the insect that calculates, combines, decorates,
invents, and reasons, what interest can this distinction hold
for us? A far greater question and one worthier of our full
attention dominates these details. It is a matter of grasp-
ing the character, the quality, the habits, and perhaps the
object of the general intelligence whence emanate all in-
telligent acts performed on this earth. It is from this point
of view that the study of creaturesants and bees, among
othersin which are manifested most clearly, outside the
human form, the processes and the ideal of that genius, is
one of the most curious that we may undertake. It seems,
after all we have just observed, that these tendencies, these
intellectual methods are at least as complex, as advanced, as
striking in the orchids as in the social Hymenopterae. Let us
add that many of the intentions and a part of the logic of
these swarming insects, so difcult to observe, still elude us,
whereas we may grasp with ease all the silent motives, all
the wise and stable arguments of the peaceful ower.
54
XXV
Now what do we observe, in catching nature at work?
General intelligence or universal genius (the name mat-
ters little) in the world of owers? Plenty of things, and
to speak only in passing, for the subject would lend itself
to a lengthy study, we ascertain right from the start that
the owers idea of beauty, of lightheartedness, its meth-
ods of seduction and its aesthetic tastes are very close to
our own. But it would doubtless be more accurate to af-
rm that its and ours are in keeping. It is, in fact, highly
uncertain that we have ever invented a beauty entirely
our own. All our architectural and musical motifs, all our
harmonies of color and light, etc., are borrowed directly
from nature. Without evoking the sea, the mountains, the
skies, the night, the dusk, what might one not say, for
instance, of the beauty of trees? I speak not only of the
tree as it makes up the forest, where it forms one of the
great powers of the earth, perhaps the principal source
of our instincts, of our sense of the universe, but of the
tree in itself, of the solitary tree, whose green old age is
laden with a thousand seasons. Among those impressions
which, without our knowing it, form the limpid hollow
and perhaps the deepest calm and happiness of our entire
existence, who among us does not guard the memory of
a few beautiful trees? When we have passed midlife, when
we reach the end of the awestruck phase, when we have
all but exhausted the spectacles that may be offered by art,
55
genius, and the wealth of centuries and men, after having
experienced and compared so many things, we return to
very simple memories. Two or three innocent, unchang-
ing, and refreshing images stand out on the puried ho-
rizon, images that we would like to carry into the nal
sleep, if it be true that an image may cross the threshold
that separates our two worlds. For my part, I can imagine
no paradise, nor life beyond the grave, however splendid
it may be, in which one would fail to nd in place some
magnicent beech of the Sainte-Baume Mountains,
some cypress, or some umbrella pine of Florence or of a
humble hermitage close to my house, any one of which
offers the passerby a model of all the great movements of
necessary resistance, of quiet courage, of soaring, of grav-
ity, of silent victory, and of perseverance.
XXVI
But I digress too much; I simply intended to note, con-
cerning the ower, that nature, when it wishes to be
beautiful, to please, to delight, and to show its joy, rather
does as we would do were we endowed with its trea-
sures. I know, speaking thus, that I speak somewhat like
the bishop who admired the fact that providence always
made great rivers ow close to great cities, but it is dif-
cult to envisage these things from a nonhuman point
of view. Let us, then, from this point of view, consider
that we would know very few signs or expressions of
56
happiness if we did not know the ower. In order to
judge well its power of joy and beauty, we must live
in that part of a country where it reigns unchallenged,
like the corner of Provence, between the Stagne and
the Loup, where I am writing these lines. Here, truly,
the ower is the sole sovereign of the valleys and hills.
The peasants here have lost the habit of growing wheat,
as though they no longer had to provide other than
for the needs of subtler humankind that would live on
sweet scents and ambrosia. The elds form one great
bouquet that renews itself endlessly, and the scents that
follow one another seem to do their rounds through-
out the sky-blue year. Anemones, gillyowers, mimosas,
violets, pinks, narcissi, hyacinths, daffodils, mignonettes,
jasmines, and tuberoses invade the days and nights, the
months of winter, summer, spring, and autumn. But the
nest moment belongs to the May roses. Then, as far
as the eye can see, from the hillsides to the hollow of
the plains, between embankments of vines and olive
trees, they ow on all sides like a river of petals whence
emerge houses and trees, a river of the color we give
to youth, health, and joy. The aroma that spreads across
the sky, at once warm and fresh, but especially roomy,
emanates, one would think, directly from the sources of
bliss. The roadways and pathways are carved in the pulp
of the ower, in the very substance of paradises. It seems
that, for the rst time in our life, we have a satisfying
vision of happiness.
57
XXVII
Still from our human point of view and preserving the
necessary illusion, let us add to our rst remark another
one a little more elaborate, a little less hazardous, and per-
haps great with consequence, namely, that the genius of
the earth, which is probably that of the entire world, acts
in the vital struggle exactly as a man would do. It employs
the same methods, the same logic. It reaches its goals by
the means we would use, it feels its way, it hesitates, it goes
in for trial and error, it adds, it eliminates, it recognizes
and corrects its mistakes, as we would do in its place. It
exerts itself, it invents laboriously and little by little, in the
manner of the artisans and engineers of our workshops. It
struggles, as we would, with the weighty, huge, and obscure
mass of its being. It knows no more than we whither it
goes; it seeks and nds itself gradually. It has an often con-
fused ideal, but one in which we distinguish nonetheless a
host of broad outlines that rise toward a more passionate,
complex, sinewy, and spiritual form of life. Materially, it
disposes of innite resources, it knows the secret of prodi-
gious forces of which we are unaware, but intellectually, it
seems strictly to occupy our sphere, and we do not claim,
thus far, that it exceeds its limits. And if it does not try
to derive anything from beyond that sphere, does it not
mean there is nothing outside it? Does it not mean that
the methods of the human mind are the only ones possible,
58
that man has not got it wrong, that he is neither an excep-
tion nor a monster, but the being through whom pass and
in whom are manifested most intensely the great will, the
great desire of the universe?
XXVIII
The benchmarks of our knowledge emerge slowly, spar-
ingly. Perhaps Platos famous image, the cave on whose
walls unaccountable shadows are reected, no longer suf-
ces, but if we wanted to substitute for it a new and more
exact gure, it would hardly be more consoling. Imagine
that cave grown larger. No ray of light would ever enter it.
Excepting daylight and re, it would be carefully furnished
with everything that comprises our civilization, and men
would nd themselves prisoners there from birth. They
would not miss the light, having never seen it; they would
not be blind, and their eyes would not be dead, but having
nothing to look at, those eyes would probably become the
most sensitive organ of touch.
In order to recognize ourselves in their movements,
let us picture these unfortunates in their shadows, amid
the multitude of unknown things that surround them.
What strange mistakes, incredible deviations, unexpected
interpretations! But how touching and often ingenious
would seem the course of action they would take regard-
ing things that had not been created for use at night!
How many times would they have guessed correctly, and
59
how great would be their astonishment, if suddenly, in
the light of day, they were to discover the true nature and
intended purpose of tools and devices that they would
have tried their best to adapt to the uncertainties of the
darkness?
Yet in comparison with our own, their position seems
simple and easy. The mystery in which they creep about is
limited. They are only deprived of one sense, whereas it
is impossible to estimate the number of those in which
we are lacking. The cause of their errors is unique, but we
cannot keep count of our own.
Since we live in a cave of this kind, is it not interest-
ing to assert that the power that has placed us there acts
often and on some important points just as we ourselves
act? There are gleams of light in our underground cavern
that show us we have not been mistaken in the use of all
the objects to be found therein, and some of these gleams
are brought to us there by insects and owers.
XXIX
We have taken for a long time a rather foolish pride in
believing ourselves to be miraculous beings, unique and
wonderfully open to chance, probably fallen from another
world, without clear ties to the rest of life and, in any case,
endowed with an unusual, incomparable, awful ability. It
is far preferable to be nowhere near so prodigious, for we
have learned that prodigies soon vanish in the normal evo-
60
lution of nature. It is much more consoling to observe that
we follow the same path as the soul of this great world,
that we have the same ideas, the same hopes, the same tri-
als, andwere it not for our specic dream of justice and
pityalmost the same feelings. It is much more calming
to assure ourselves that, to better our lot, to utilize the
forces, the opportunities, the laws of matter, we employ
methods exactly the same as those that the soul uses to il-
luminate and order its unruly and unconscious areas; that
there are no other methods, that we are in the midst of
truth, that we are in our rightful place and at home in this
universe molded by unknown substances, whose thought
is not impenetrable and hostile but analogous or apposite
to our own.
If nature knew everything, if it were never mistaken,
if everywhere, in all its enterprises, it showed itself from
the outset to be perfect and infallible, if it revealed intelli-
gence in every respect immeasurably superior to our own,
then there would be reason to fear and to lose courage.
We would feel like the victims and prey of an extraneous
power, one which we would have no hope of knowing or
measuring. It is far preferable to convince ourselves that
this power, at the very least from an intellectual standpoint,
is closely related to our own. Our mind draws from the
same reservoirs as does that of nature. We are of the same
world, we are almost among equals. We no longer mix with
inaccessible gods, but with veiled and fraternal wills, which
are for us to discover unexpectedly and to redirect.
61
XXX
It would not, I imagine, be very bold to maintain that
we do not have beings who are more or less intelligent,
but a scattered, general intelligence, a kind of universal
uid that penetrates diversely the organisms it encoun-
ters, depending on whether they are good or bad con-
ductors of consciousness. Mankind would represent, until
now, upon this earth, the realm of life that offered the
least resistance to this uid that the religions call divine.
Our nerves would be the wires along which this sub-
tler electricity would spread. The circumvolutions of our
brain would form in some way the electric coil in which
the force of the current would multiply, but this current
would be of no other nature, would come from no other
source than that which passes through the stone, the star,
the ower, or the animal.
But these are mysteries that it is somewhat idle to
question, seeing that we do not yet possess an organ that
can obtain their response. Let us be content in having ob-
served certain manifestations of that intelligence outside
ourselves. Everything we observe in ourselves is rightly
suspect; we are at once judge and plaintiff, and we have
too much interest in peopling our world with magnicent
illusions and hopes. But let the slightest external indication
be dear and precious to us. Those that the owers have
just offered us are probably quite minor compared with
62
those the mountain, the sea, and the stars might tell us, if
we were to come upon the secrets of their life. They allow
us nonetheless to presume with more self-condence that
the spirit animating all things or emanating from them is of
the same essence as that one animating our bodies. If this
spirit resembles us, if we thus resemble it, if all that is found
in it is also found in ourselves, if it employs our methods,
if it has our habits, our preoccupations, our tendencies, our
desires for improvement, is it illogical to hope for all we
hope for, instinctively, irresistibly, since almost certainly it
hopes for the same too? Is it likely, when we nd scattered
through life such a great sum of intelligence, that this life
should make no work of intelligence, that is to say, should
not pursue a goal of happiness, of perfection, of victory
over that which we call evil, death, darkness, nothingness,
that which is probably only the shadow of its face or its
own state of sleep?
63
Scents
After having spoken long enough about the intelligence
of owers, it will seem natural for us to say a word about
their soul, which is their scent. Unfortunately here, as with
the soul of man, the scent of another sphere in which
reason bathes, we immediately touch upon the unknow-
able. We know virtually nothing of the intention of that
magnicently invisible zone of festive air that the corol-
las spread around themselves. It is, in fact, highly doubtful
that it serves principally to attract insects. First of all, many
owers, among them the most fragrant, do not allow cross-
fertilization, so that the visit of the bee or the buttery is
a matter of indifference or is unwelcome to them. Then,
what draw the insects are strictly the pollen and the nectar,
which generally have no discernible scent. So we see them
neglect the most deliciously scented owers, like the rose
and the pink, in order to throng those of the maple or the
hazel, whose aroma is virtually nonexistent.
Let us admit, then, that we still do not know in
what way scents are useful to the ower, just as we do
2
64
not know why we detect them. Smell is actually the most
unexplained of our senses. It is evident that sight, hearing,
touch, and taste are indispensable to our animal life. Only a
lengthy education teaches us to take pleasure impartially in
form, color, and sound. Moreover, our sense of smell also
performs important menial functions. It is the guardian of
the air we breathe; it is the hygienist and the chemist who
watch carefully over the quality of the proffered foodstuffs,
every unpleasant emanation revealing the presence of sus-
picious or dangerous germs. But alongside this practical
mission, there is another that seemingly answers to noth-
ing. Scents are in all respects useless to our physical life. Too
violent, too permanent, they can even become hostile to
it. We possess nonetheless a faculty that takes great pleasure
in them and brings us good tidings with as much enthusi-
asm and conviction as if it were a matter of discovering a
fruit or a delicious beverage. This uselessness deserves our
attention. It must hide a beautiful secret. Here is the sole
occurrence of nature that procures us a gratuitous pleasure,
a satisfaction that does not adorn a trap of necessity. Smell
is the unique sense of luxury granted to us. But it seems al-
most foreign to our body, tied very loosely to our organism.
Is it a device that develops or decays, a faculty that is falling
asleep or awakening? Everything leads us to believe that
it evolves along with our civilization. The ancients barely
bothered with anything other than the most brutal, heavy,
solid smells, so to speakmusk, benzoin, myrrh, frankin-
cense, etc.and the scent of owers is quite rarely men-
tioned in Greek and Latin poetry or in Hebrew literature.
65
Yet do we see our peasant folk today, even at their greatest
ease, think of snifng a violet or a rose? On the contrary, is
it not the very rst gesture of the big-city inhabitant who
comes across a ower? There is sufcient reason therefore
to accept smell as the last born of our senses, the only one
perhaps that may not be on the road to regression, as the
biologists so thoughtfully put it. It is a reason for us to at-
tach ourselves to it, question it, and cultivate its potential.
Who may tell what surprises it would have in store for us,
if it were to equal, for instance, the perfection of the eye,
as it does in the dog, who lives as much by the nose as by
the eyes?
We have there an unexplored world. To think bet-
ter of this mysterious sense that, at rst, seems almost
foreign to our organism, is perhaps to think of it as the
most intimately penetrative one. Are we not, above all,
aerial beings? Is not air the most absolutely and most
immediately indispensable element to us, and is not
smell truly the only sense that perceives some parts of
it? Scents, jewels of the air we need to breathe, do not
embellish it without reason. It would not be surpris-
ing if this misunderstood luxury answers to something
deeply profound and essential and rather, as we have
just seen, to something that does not yet exist than to
something that no longer does. It is highly likely that
this sense, the only one turned toward the future, may
already grasp the most striking manifestations of a form
or of a happy or benecial state of matter that holds
plenty of surprises in store for us.
66
Meanwhile, it remains subject to the most violent,
least subtle perceptions. It barely suspects, in making use
of the imagination, the profound and harmonious ema-
nations that clearly envelop the great spectacles of atmo-
sphere and light. As we are on the verge of grasping those
of rain or of dusk, why should we not come to discern and
to determine the scent of snow, ice, morning dew, the rst
fruits of dawn, the twinkling of stars? Everything in space
must have its scent, still inconceivable, even a moonbeam, a
trickle of water, a drifting cloud, a smiling sky.
2
Chance, or rather choice of life, has led me back these days
to the places where nearly all the scents of Europe are born
and prepared. In fact, as we all know, it is on the luminous
strip of land stretching from Cannes to Nice that the last
hills and last valleys of authentic living owers keep up a
heroic struggle with the foul chemical odors of Germany,
which are exactly to natural scents what painted forests
and plains in an art gallery are to the forests and plains of
the true countryside.
The work of the peasant there is ordered by a kind
of uniquely oral calendar, in which, in May and July, two
adorable queens reign supreme: the rose and the jasmine.
From January to December, around these two sovereigns
of the year, one the color of dawn, the other clothed in
white stars, parade the innumerable and hasty violets, the
tumultuous daffodils, the naive narcissi that ll the eye
67
with wonder, the giant mimosas, the mignonettes, the
pinks laden with precious spices, the imperious geranium,
the tyrannically virginal orange blossom, the lavender, the
Spanish broom, the all too powerful tuberose, and the cas-
sia, which is a type of acacia and bears a ower similar to
an orange-hued caterpillar.
It is rather disconcerting at rst to see the large, dull-
witted, and uncouth rustics, whom pure necessity every-
where distracts from the smiling side of life, taking owers
so seriously, handling so carefully these fragile ornaments
of the earth, accomplishing a bees or a princesss task and
bending beneath the yoke of the violets or the daffodils.
But the most striking impression is that of certain evenings
or mornings in the season of the rose or the jasmine. We
might believe the atmosphere of the earth has undergone a
sudden change, has given way to that of an innitely happy
planet, where scent is no longer, as down here, eeting,
vague, and precarious, but stable, expansive, full, perma-
nent, generous, normal, inalienable.
2
In speaking of Grasse and its surroundings, we have drawn
more than onceat least I suppose sothe picture of
that almost fairy-tale industry occupying an entire hard-
working town, stuck on the side of a mountain like a
sun-drenched hive. We must have spoken of the magni-
cent cartloads of pink roses unloaded on the doorsteps of
the smoking factories, the vast halls where the sorters are
68
literally swimming in the waves of petals, the less bulky but
more precious arrival of the violets, the tuberoses, the cas-
sias, the jasmines, in broad baskets that the peasant women
carry nobly on their heads. We must have described the
various procedures by which we extract from the owers,
according to their features, the marvelous secrets of their
hearts, so as to x them in crystal. We know that some
roses, for example, are extremely obliging and good-willed
and yield their aroma straightforwardly. We pile them up
in huge boilers, as tall as those of our rail locomotives,
into which steam passes. Little by little their essential oil,
more costly than a jelly of pearls, seeps drop by drop into a
narrow glass tube like a goose feather, at the bottom of an
alembic resembling some kind of monster that would with
difculty give birth to an amber tear.
But the majority of owers let their soul be impris-
oned less easily. I shall not speak here of all the innitely
varied tortures that we inict on them to force them even-
tually to abandon the treasure they hide desperately at the
bottom of their corollas. To give an idea of the trick of the
executioner and of the obstinacy of certain victims, it will
sufce to recall the agony of the cold press that the daffo-
dil, the mignonette, the tuberose, and the jasmine undergo
before breaking the silence. Let us note in passing that the
scent of the jasmine is the only inimitable one, the only
one unobtainable by the skilful blending of other scents.
So we spread out a bed of grease thick as two ngers
on large glass plates, and the whole is abundantly covered
with owers. Following what unctuous maneuvers and
69
promises does the grease obtain the irrevocable condenc-
es? Whatever the case may be, the poor, all too trusting
owers soon have nothing left to lose. Each morning they
are picked up, thrown into the garbage, and a new swathe
of ingnues replaces them on the insidious bed. In turn
they succumb, suffer the same fate, and then many others
follow them. It is only after three months, that is to say, af-
ter having devoured ninety generations of owers that the
greedy and specious grease, sated with surrenders and with
embalmed confessions, refuses to strip any further victims.
As for the violet, it resists the entreaties of the cold
grease; we must add to it the torment of re. We heat the
lard in a pot. Following this barbaric treatment, the humble
and pleasant ower of the springtime byways gradually los-
es the strength that kept its secret. It yields, it gives itself up,
and its liquid executioner, before being sated, absorbs four
times its weight in petals, which means that the shame-
ful torture continues throughout the season of the violets
blooming beneath the olive trees.
But the drama is not over. Now it is a matter, whether
it is warm or cold, of making this miserly grease cough up
the absorbed treasure, which it intends to hold on to with
all its crude and evasive energies. We succeed in this with
great difculty. The grease has base passions that ruin it.
It is soaked in alcohol, it is intoxicated, and it ends up by
letting go. Now it is the alcohol that possesses the mystery.
No sooner has the alcohol seized the mystery than it too
intends to share it with no one else, to keep it for itself
alone. In turn we attack it, we reduce it, we evaporate it, we
70
condense it, and the liquid pearl, after so many adventures,
pure, essential, inexhaustible, and almost imperishable, is
nally gathered in a crystal phial.
I will not list the chemical extraction processes: by
petroleum gases, by carbon sulfur, etc. The great perfumers
of Grasse, loyal to tradition, are repelled by those articial
and almost dishonest methods, which yield only pungent
scents and bruise the owers soul.
71
On the Publication History
of Maeterlincks Botanical Essays
In 1904 Maeterlinck broached a botanical theme in Le
Double Jardin (The Double Garden), a collection of sixteen
essays on various subjects published in Paris by Eugne
Fasquelle. It contained four essays related to botany: Les
Sources du printemps (The Sources of Spring), Fleurs
des champs (Flowers of the Fields), Crysanthmes
(Crysanthemums), and Fleurs dmodes (Old-fashioned
Flowers). Incidentally, this collection also contained one
of Maeterlincks most celebrated essays, Sur la mort dun
petit chien (On the Death of a Small Dog).
LIntelligence des eurs was rst published in Paris
by Eugne Fasquelle in 1907. Including Les Parfums
(Scents), it contained eleven essays, again on various sub-
jects. The eponymous essay rst appeared in English in
The Intelligence of the Flowers translated by Alexander Teix-
eira de Mattos in numbers 679, 681 and 682 of Harpers
Magazine in 190607. Also in 1907 this translation was
published as a book in New York by Dodd, Mead and Co.,
2
72
with a twelfth essay added, decoration by William Edgar
Fisher, and illustrations from photographs by Alvin Lang-
don Coburn. Later that same year Dodd, Mead and Co.
added another edition, entitled The Measure of the Hours,
changing the order of the essays and naming the volume
after the third essay, whose subject is time.
LIntelligence des eurs was republished in 1923 jointly
by Robert Sand in Brussels, Editions du Dauphin in An-
twerp, and G. Crs in Paris. This edition included wood-
cuts by J-M. Canneel and a frontispiece etched by Lou-
ise Danse. Further editions appeared in 1939 (Fasquelle),
reprinted in facsimile in 1977 by Editions dAujourdhui
(Paris); in 1946 in Lausanne (Editions du Grand-Chne);
in 1954, in a volume entitled Insectes et eurs (Insects and
Flowers, Paris: Gallimard/N.R.F.) along with the corre-
sponding essays on the bee, the ant, and the termite plus
a 1934 essay on the pigeon; and in 1955 (Paris: Editions
du Reet) with illustrations by Tavy Notton. In 1997, the
essay (again along with those on the bee, the ant, and the
termite) appeared in a volume entitled La Vie de la nature
(The Life of Nature, Brussels: Editions Complexe) with
a preface by Jacques Lacarrire and an afterword by Paul
Gorceix.
Republications of the English translation of
LIntelligence des eurs appeared in 1911, as Life and Flowers
(London: George Allen), a British edition of the original
American translation, also with a twelfth essay added; and
in 2001 (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacic), a re-
print of the 1907 translation of the eponymous essay.
The present translation seeks to render Maeterlincks
essay more accessible to the contemporary reader and to
offer a critical context lacking in earlier editions.
73
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NATUREI ESSAYS
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:o us. Iio~:s g:op~ :n :h~ sam~ da:in~ss, ~n.oun:~: :h~ sam~ obs:a.i~s
and :h~ sam~ :ii :ii, :n :h~ sam~ uninon. Th~ ino :h~ sam~ ias,
sam~ d:sappo:n:m~n:s, sam~ sio and d:ii.ui: :::umphs. I: s~~ms :h~
ha~ ou: pa::~n.~, ou: p~:s~~:an.~, ou: s~ii~io~, :h~ sam~ in~i :un~d
and d:~:s:i~d :n:~ii:g~n.~, aimos: :h~ sam~ hop~s and :h~ sam~ :d~ais.
L:i~ ou:s~i~s, :h~ s::uggi~ aga:ns: a as: :nd:ii~:~n: io:.~ :ha: ~nds b
h~ip:ng :h~m.
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:~g:~::abi io:go::~n :n ou: ::m~, :s iong o~:du~. Th~ :n::odu.::on b
mosi~ :s ::s~ii a g~m, and .on:a:ns on~ oi :h~ b~s: o~::~s :n p::n: oi
::::ngs abou: :n:~ii:g~n.~ :n Na:u:~.
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Th~ 8~.:~: T~a.h:ngs oi Pian:s Th~ In:~ii:g~n.~ oi :h~ H~a::
:n :h~ L::~.: P~:.~p::on oi Na:u:~
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