The Ruizia mauritiana is a large green shrub with cascading leaves shaped like lovehearts. There’s one just off the main walkway through the magnificent Temperate House in London’s Kew Gardens, a Victorian marvel nearly 200 metres long. Among all the surrounding greenery, the plant looks unassuming – but examples of this specimen are extremely rare. In fact, by the mid-1990s, it was thought to be extinct in the wild. But then came some thrilling news: a 10-metre tall example had been spotted in the Mauritian highlands. And soon Kew’s scientists were wading through a guava thicket in the east African island nation to take some cuttings.
Those scientists would go on to make a remarkable discovery. Previously, the Ruizia mauritiana was thought only to grow male flowers (whose stamen produce pollen). But, during its cultivation, researchers realised that this wasn’t the case: the sex of this plant’s flowers depends on the temperature. In hot conditions, it grows male flowers. But in cooler climates, it produces female ones (whose stigmata receive pollen).
Such stories are among the highlights of Queer Nature, a festival at Kew celebrating the astonishing diversity of plants and fungi – and looking at how they have inspired and connected with the LGBTQ+ community. These connections can actually be made through language alone: for example, the majority of flowering plants contain both male and female reproductive structures, their flowers often being described as bisexual – or perfect.
The story of the Ruizia mauritiana will be surrounded by others, together highlighting the inspiring complexities of the plant world. Also on display will be fungi, which have thousands of different mating types; modern citrus trees, known for their ability to transition between sexual and asexual reproduction; and avocados, whose flowers open twice – firstly to be functionally female, and secondly to be functionally male. This unusual last feature encourages cross-pollination with other avocado plants, bolstering genetic diversity in the process.
“I think there’s comfort for queer people in nature, because it does embrace us,” says artist Jeffrey Gibson, whose new artwork, House of Spirits, was created for the exhibition. “It allows us to project everything from beauty to sexuality, even feelings of rejection and depression and death.”
Gibson’s hanging installation features prints of cuttings from his own garden and is inspired by his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage, as well as the writings of Derek Jarman, the gay activist, artist and gardener, who died from an Aids-related illness in 1994. Plants, says Gibson, “don’t seem to be constricted in the way that we are in our society. We’re determined to name things and set boundaries. My perception is that, in nature, things feel much more free. It feels much more organic, for lack of a better word.”
In recent years, LGBTQ+ gardening groups and collectives have sprung up around Britain, from Glasgow to Newcastle to London, looking at everything from community plots to food security and environmental justice. In 2020, designer and illustrator Sixto-Juan Zavala was inspired to set up his group, Queer Botany, after moving to London from Texas. “I thought there was so much potential in botany for queer theory,” says Zavala, who also wants his group to provide somewhere for people to “connect to the queer community in a space that’s not focused on alcohol”.
Zavala was inspired by the diversity of nature. For example, plants can reproduce sexually – often through flowers, with the fusion of male gametes in pollen with the female gametes in ovules – and also asexually, to produce clones of themselves, including from the propagation of bulbs (such as daffodils) or rhizomes (like ginger stems) grown underground. “There’s this innate queerness there,” says Zavala. “And it’s social constructs – human-made, socio political constructs – that are placed on to ourselves, but then also on nature, the nonhuman as well.”
Zavala highlights how, since the 18th century, plants have been classified under a system developed by Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus. But, as our understanding has developed, the living world has not always fitted neatly into these boxes. “When you see how plants can exist without these constructs and how abundant their sexual diversity is – it’s just inspiring,” says Zavala. “I think for a queer person it can be quite uplifting and validating.”
So strong is this association between plants and the LGBTQ+ community that it has broken into pop culture. Last year, drag artist Cheddar Gorgeous wore a dress made of yellow and black pansies on the runway of RuPaul’s Drag Race, in a tribute to The Pansy Project, which plants pansies at the sites of homophobic or transphobic attacks – reclaiming the word’s use as a slur. Artist Paul Harfleet began the project in 2005, following the murder of David Morley, who had earlier survived the 1999 homophobic bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in London’s Soho.
A few years back, Australian pop star Troye Sivan, meanwhile, released his song Bloom, describing it as “subversively queer” and highlighting the use of flowers as symbolism within the LGBTQ+ community. When asked in one interview about the song’s meaning, amid rumours that it alluded to gay sex, Sivan replied with a wink: “It’s 100% about flowers!”
In New York over the summer, the prestigious Alice Austen House launched its collaborative Queer Ecologies Garden Project, including a hands-on community garden, adding to the growing number of queer horticulture groups popping up across the US – from the Mariposas Rebeldes farming collective in Atlanta to The Institute of Queer Ecology in New York. The project presents new opportunities to explore the work of Austen, a lesbian photographer who defied social norms, living in the grounds with her long-term partner Gertrude Tate.
The connection between plants and the LGBTQ+ community stretches right back through history, though, inspiring artists, botanists and activists alike. In ancient Greece, Sappho’s poems about women frequently referenced flowers, most notably the violet. In 1892, Oscar Wilde instructed his friends to wear green carnations at the premiere of one of his plays – the flower soon becoming associated with homosexuality. In 1970, a radical lesbian feminist group in New York was named after a common purple flower. They were called Lavender Menace.
In mid-1990s California, photographer and writer Irene Reti, with her then partner Valerie Jean Chase, published an anthology exploring the links between the lesbian community and gardening. Garden Variety Dykes: Lesbian Traditions in Gardening featured essays from women from Canada to Australia. “Valerie and I were just obsessed with gardening,” explains Reti from her home in California. “It was like, ‘Oh, we love this. Let’s do a book.’” She recalls piecing the book together across a three-year period, opening her “little post-office box” in Santa Cruz to find out who had sent in essays. She recalls “this moment of excitement of opening it with the key and like, ‘Oh my God, somebody wrote from Australia’, or, you know, this woman from Arkansas.”
The book, she says, was also in part about providing much-needed visibility for lesbian gardeners and “wanting to see ourselves and knowing that we were out there”. She was inspired by the international Womyn’s land movement, where lesbians set up as many as 150 utopian rural communities across the US and beyond as utopias away from the rest of society. “Gardening was something that I saw as, among the women I knew, a really important part of our lesbian culture.”
These days, gardening is harder on Reti’s back, as she’s now in her early 60s. But she still enjoys it. Currently, she’s growing roses and native wildflowers. What amazes her is how popular her book remains today. “It feels very much still current in the ways that we, as an LGBT community, are still thinking, in this era of climate change and food insecurity.”
Reti continues to receive letters from women around the world – including a group of young lesbians in rural France a couple of years ago. “Garden Variety Dykes has had an enduring kind of quality and that feels exciting and affirming – that it’s not just something to be put in an archive as a relic of an earlier time.”
Nearly three decades on from Reti’s book, these associations continue to bloom: deep-rooted, enduring and evergreen.
• Queer Nature is at Kew Gardens, London, from 30 September to 29 October
