How Shakespeare’s Sonnets Taught Me to Stop Fearing Sex and Love Plants

As the decade of the virus plods on, I have been seeking refuge from the fear and monotony of daily living in houseplants. It’s trendy now—to own plants. People have tried to pathologize my generation to explain this trend. They say millennials are too poor or flighty for pets or children, and plants are the low-pressure alternative. Others speculate that urban settings are cutting us off from nature, and without the option of nurturing a backyard, we flock to houseplants as a last resort. Maybe plants force us to slow down amid our (once) hectic, cosmopolitan lives.

I think the plant thing is about sex. At the very least, I think it’s about sex for me.

There are many ways in which plants function as metaphors for sex. The language of plants is everywhere in our discussions of human sexuality: we say “seed” for semen, and “flower” and “bush” for the vulva and its hair. Breasts “bud,” women “blossom,” and men “sow their wild oats.” Wombs can be “fertile” like soil. You can’t escape plants when you think about sex.

This is not a new thing in our language. Thirty out of Shakespeare’s one hundred fifty-four sonnets—still some of the most popular love poetry of all time—mention plants.Thirty-nine if you include the references to nature. That’s twenty-five percent of Shakespeare’s total sonnetic output. It’s interesting that references to plants are mostly absent in the latter twenty-eight sonnets, which are about a dark-haired mistress (possibly Shakespeare’s wife), while the first one hundred twenty-six, about an unknown male love, are positively verdant. You can almost imagine Shakespeare sitting around under a tree in the full bloom of spring, moonily daydreaming about whatever young aristocrat had captured his heart. Everything is green; everything is sex. The Bard’s muse is beautiful enough to generate over a hundred poems, all superlative in their invocations of the man’s appearance:

How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made

By looking on thee in the living day, […]

All days are nights to see till I see thee,

And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me. 

(Sonnet 43)

When I was younger, the thought of sex made me miserable because I was convinced I was too ugly for anyone to want to have sex with me. I felt a perversely pleasant melancholy at this idea. I had a unique cross to bear: everyone else would have sex, but not me. This singled me out and made me a tragic figure—which, in itself, was sort of sexy. I clung to this as my consolation prize for lifelong virginity.

I did not look too closely at the fact that most of my conviction that I would never have sex came from the fact that I couldn’t imagine myself having sex with men. I had been imagining myself with women for years. 

It felt embarrassing, after styling myself as a contemporary Vestal virgin for twenty years (i.e., committed to an as-yet-undiscovered noble task, possibly writing bad poetry, and therefore unable to indulge in earthly pleasures), to finally admit that yes, I was interested in having sex. When I accepted this, I faced my fundamental conundrum: sex, I believed, belonged to beautiful people. The very first couplet of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1 reads: “From fairest creatures we desire increase,/ That thereby beauty’s rose might never die.” That’s what I thought about sex, in a nutshell. Why propagate an ugly flower? But if I was ugly and sex belonged to the beautiful, how could I ever have this experience I desperately wanted?

Eventually, like many other ugly people, I started to have sex. Around the same time, I started becoming interested in houseplants. I don’t think that was a coincidence. 

I used to be terrified of owning plants for one, big reason: I was afraid of their deaths. As a kid, I had a recurring nightmare that included, in a series of disjointed scenes, a vista of brown leaves all curling in on themselves. The unstoppable process of death in plants was deeply unsettling to me. 

Shakespeare’s first thirty or so sonnets are obsessed with death. He wrestles with how to prevent the death of his love, and preserve his beauty forever. He is able to come up with two solutions to this problem: his love could have a son to carry on his beautiful genes or Shakespeare could immortalize him in his writing—preferably both. Shakespeare is insistent about his prescriptions. After suggesting that people might not believe how beautiful his love was after he’s passed, Shakespeare cautions (nags?) that “were some child of yours alive that time,/ You should live twice, in it and in my rhyme” (Sonnet 17). Shakespeare’s most famous sonnet, Sonnet 18, can also be found in this section. It too, is about plants, sex, and death. It reads:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date […]

Beautiful people die, and Shakespeare saw that in every plant around him. As far as he was concerned, it was one of the greatest tragedies of living:

When I do count the clock that tells the time, […]

When I behold the violet past the prime, […]

Then of thy beauty do I question make,

That thou among the wastes of time must go […]

(Sonnet 12)

I acquired my first houseplant, a Haworthiopsis fasciata, when a friend moved away and voluntold his friends to adopt his plants. I could not allow mine to die, for fear of disappointing my friend. I took great pains to keep the little plant alive. To my astonishment, the plant began to grow. Still, I was afraid of its death. Like in my childhood nightmare, I feared decay and demise, even when it wasn’t actively happening:

Or, if [birds] sing, ‘tis with so dull a cheer

That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near. 

(Sonnet 97)

I began collecting more plants following my success with my friend’s succulent. Despite all my best efforts, some of these plants died. Plants that flowered spectacularly one season died the next. Plants grew shoots that withered. I poured love and devotion into relationships, and still they ended.

For never-resting time leads summer on

To hideous winter and confounds him there,

Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,

Beauty o’er-snowed and bareness everywhere. 

(Sonnet 5)

I always thought sex would transform me, Beauty and the Beast-style, into someone worth having sex with. When I began having sex, exactly as I was, without experiencing a Miss Congeniality-style transformation first, it was heartbreaking. I realized I did not have to be beautiful to have sex. Consequently, I realized that sex did not have the capacity to stave off death or pain or heartbreak, all properly the domain of ugly people. This is something I really believed as a kid, even if just subconsciously: being beautiful enough to have a sexual partner guaranteed a person infinite generative power, essentially a kind of immortality. Beautiful people, like Shakespeare’s love, lived on forever in the adoring words of others. 

It took me a while to realize that the sex I was experiencing wasn’t bad. Eventually, it felt like a revelation to engage in an act that was pleasurable and blatantly, unapologetically ugly. Like my bumpy, fleshy, hairy plants, sex was fun because it was natural for it to be all of those things. It was a mortal pleasure, not a saintly one. I have a pet theory that millennials buy cacti and succulents because they look strange, and because we are starved of things that look strange. To be strange, to be ugly, is to be expelled from the garden of Eden—to be sentenced to mortality, and ultimately, death. Without beauty, we cannot transcend. Only beauty is called upon to replicate in Shakespeare’s sonnets. But to be able to revel in the ugliness of sex is to participate in the delight of an earthly garden. It is full of imperfections. It is not eternal, but everyone is allowed in. And for that reason, there are some weird, interesting plants there.

Despite his hang-ups, I think Shakespeare, too, was trying to make peace with his temporary garden:

But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,

Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet. 

(Sonnet 5)

In French, they call the post-orgasm feeling le petit mort, the “little death.” All yearning, all progress forward, all narrative thrust, ends in sex. I am not the first person to point this out, but it has taken me a long time to accept all of the implications of this fact. Sex is ugly—and when I accepted that, I finally realized that it was beautiful. And I stopped being afraid of dying houseplants.