Modes of reproduction in the plant kingdom are not binary, she explains, but far more diverse. She makes a compelling case that plants do not have sex. And she observes that the xenophobic anxieties surrounding immigration and invasive species make for a telling parallel.
Since Botany of Empire is a work from an academic press by an author who holds a PhD in zoology and genetics and now is a professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies, a reader might expect the prose to be dense and laced with specialized language and concepts. That reader would be happily mistaken. Language and concepts that may be unfamiliar to a layperson are introduced carefully and clearly. Still, the book calls for slow reading—not because it’s “difficult,” but because many of the ideas presented are so fresh. I found myself finishing a paragraph and looking up from the page, taking a deep breath and staring into space for a minute to let the idea at hand settle in. It also demands slow reading because the prose is beautifully crafted: I reread many sentences and paragraphs for no reason other than to savor their sheer elegance. The book’s one-and-a-half-page prologue, a rumination framed as a series of rhetorical questions on how to tell a difficult history, might be a prose poem.