Luffa: “Sex” in the garden

Luffa is a tropical vine that grows ever so slowly in western Pennsylvania.  It takes 150 to 200 warm to hot days to bear luffa fruits.  Katy has kept vigilant eyes on luffa flowering.  A female flower would go wasted without pollination from a male flower.  Bees are the best pollinators.  However there seem to have less bees around than the years past, despite the fact that we also have planted so many flowers.

Pollination is a “boy meets girl” thing.  Seeing a female flower, Katy would act like a pollinator.  We have seen too many male flowers and few female ones.  But it is not just the ratio of male to female flowers, but also whether they are nearby.

The photo shows a bee buried his (I say a bee is a “he” to go along with Dickinson’s poem, in which bee is male and flower female) head busy having a feast in one female flower (埋頭苦吃).

 I wrote a post of “Emily Dickinson romanticized bee-flower relationship with sexual allusion” in 2010.  I might repeat the story here as well.  Without sex one cannot produce, luffa is no exception.  In The Seduction of Emily Dickinson, Robert McClure pointed out that flower is, after all, a sexual organ and pollination is a sexual act, thus we read “Their moment consummated” in Dickinson’s poem.

A Bee his burnished Carriage

Drove boldly to a Rose –

Combinedly alighting –

Himself – his Carriage was –

The Rose received his visit

With frank tranquility

Withholding not a Crescent

Their moment consummated –

Remained for him – to flee

Remained for her – of rapture

But the humility