On its face, “The Mower against Gardens” is a comically over-the-top poem in which a cantankerous mower fulminates against the human exploitation of plant sexuality, attacking a world in which human voyeurs and petty-god horticulturalists manipulate and corrupt plants by forcing them to breed in unnatural ways to serve capitalistic ends. From his opening salvo, the mower rages against the sexually suspect nature of human avarice, asserting “Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use, / Did after him the world seduce” (1–2). In addition to the obvious sexual charge implied by “seduce,” “luxurious” and “use” both had specifically sexual connotations in the early modern period, meaning “lecherous” and “sex” respectively; the rhyme of “seduce” and “use,” then, highlights the inextricability of sexual corruption from horticultural innovation. Corrupting the innocent natural world, humans “from the fields the flowers and plants allure, / Where Nature was most plain and pure” (3–4), removing them from their natural habitats through dubious means. After a glancing critique of enclosure as a newfangled and damaging agricultural practice—“He first enclosed within the gardens square / A dead and standing pool of air” (5–6), enclosure thus associated with stagnation and death—the mower proceeds to criticize other agricultural innovations at greater length, focusing on both improvements in plant nutrition and crossbreeding. Creating a “more luscious earth” for the plants (7) that “stupefied them while it fed” (8), the mower vents his dislike of new fertilizers that he believes “did change the kind,” that is, have led to an ontological shift in the plants’ constitutions. From consumption of such stupefying food, the carnation “grew then as double as his mind” (9), becoming either hypocritical in its duplicity or ambiguous in its duplication, leading to epistemological uncertainty in either case. Turning his attention to crossbreeding practices that allow flowers to acquire new coloration, the mower is enraged that roses are “taint[ed]” (11) with “strange perfumes” and “flowers themselves were taught to paint” (12). Like a procurer, man sexualizes the flowers, not only smearing them with makeup but also teaching them to paint (and thus debase) themselves, making them active participants in their own degradation.

And yet he corrupts his floral victims even more fundamentally by realigning their aesthetic preferences through the ontological shifts induced by transplantation into corrupted soil and inappropriate, mixed breeding practices—flowers now want to wear cosmetics: “The tulip, white, did for complexion seek; / And learned to interline its cheek” (13–14). “Complexion” is here an interestingly ambiguous term; it means both “cosmetics” and “natural complexion,” suggesting that the tulips ultimately come to regard their painted complexions as natural, their native judgment and physical appearance thus perverted to conform to human preference, and, as we shall come to shortly, humans’ debased economic motives. The shift of agency between lines twelve and thirteen—though initially “taught” to paint, tulips then “seek” complexion themselves—redoubles the emphasis on man’s corrupting influence over the natural world, as flowers themselves are seduced to participate in their own perversion. And all of this is a smutty travesty perpetrated not for the benefit of the flowers, but rather for transnational commercial interests; once the tulip has become variegated,

Humans have undertaken huge and unnecessary labors to wantonly transplant flowers into soils for which they are not natively suited; once back in England, they crossbred them to the point of unrecognizability, converting their natural beauty into commodity in order to gain wealth.

Over the top as his concerns may seem thus far, the mower’s hysteria reaches a pitch when he begins to speak of plant sexuality more directly, or, rather, of man’s avaricious exploitation of plant sexuality: man has

For the mower, crossbreeding plants is a sexual vice. Man “dealt between the bark and tree,” the verb “dealt” not only bringing to mind business ventures but also carrying illicit, scandalous, and sinister implications.15 According to Nigel Smith, these “forbidden mixtures” call to mind both Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:9, the mower’s invective thus taking on the weight of biblical interdiction.16 In his avarice, man “grafts upon the wild the tame,” illegitimately merging domesticated and wild—civilized and barbarous—botanical life. That is to say, the practice of grafting, in the period often “signal[ing] a disruption of the social order” and an “unsanctioned combination of different family lines,” per Erin Ellerbeck, here allows the horticulturalist to play panderer and scandalously cross-breed plants.17 As the wild shoots are grafted into the body of the domestic plant, the mower reveals an anxiety about the corruption of domesticated breeds this entails. The fruits of this union are “adult’rate,” that is, impure and morally compromised progeny that connote more than a whiff of sexual disrepute. Such outrageous admixture further disrupts the natural sensory epistemologies of taste: “put[ting] the palate in dispute,” it confuses the senses and undermines human ability to perceive and interpret the natural world. And the language of “seraglio,” “eunuchs,” and cherries “procreat[ing] without a sex” insists on the unnatural, forced, and indeed violent nature of botanical generation in this venture, in which procreation becomes artificial, “enforced” (31), and estranged from the natural world it ostensibly serves to propagate.

The mower’s solution to this conundrum is simple: a return to the halcyon days of English folklore, when “fauns and fairies do the meadows till, / More by their presence than their skill” (35–36). Returning to an English Eden, “Where willing Nature does to all dispense / A wild and fragrant innocence” (33–34), the mower counters the idea that human intervention is at all necessary for the successful maintenance of the gardens. Of course, this is rather ironic, given his own position as a mower—hardly a figure who takes a noninterventionist stance vis-à-vis the natural world—and the fields he evokes are, as he notes, not natural but rather require tillage, here performed by fauns and fairies. That he uses the present tense to suggest such an idealized relationship is still possible further suggests the naïvety of his nostalgic fantasy; had it ever been possible, it certainly wasn’t in the mid-seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the vision on which the poem closes is the return to a time before humans eagerly and cruelly exploited plant sexuality for their own avaricious gain.

So far, so laudable; that is, the mower takes a stance against human exploitation of natural resources, what Funari sees as resistance to “the narrative of the Scientific Revolution that will predominate in the seventeenth-century,” a narrative that will in many ways sever the relationship between scientist and natural world, instead constructing the latter as the proper object of epistemological—and sexual—domination.18 However, as Prawdzik cautions, such a reading of Marvell tends to smooth off the rough edges of his work in order to conform to contemporary notions of ecological morality—that is, it’s a form of greenwashing.19 And while Prawdzik is quite right to remind us that the criticized “pleasure garden [is] complicit, on the one hand, in the enclosure movement and its geographical and macroeconomic implications and, on the other, in the emergence of the commodity-form, which is the sign of these transitions,” the mower’s reasons are not mere rejection of emergent, exploitative forms of capitalism and agrarian labor arrangements.20 To simply affirm the mower’s stance as a bathetic but ultimately benign or even beneficent instance of ecological thought overlooks a critical challenge this poem poses: the ways in which the mower articulates his environmentalist stance aligns his perspective with white supremacy.

The mower’s concerns in this poem are not merely directed toward the rapacious exploitation of plant sexuality by budding capitalists; rather, his distress reflects contemporary English anxieties about racial mixing and colonial enterprise. In effect, the mower is horrified at what he sees as illicit admixture and scrambled taxonomies. His fear that “The nutriment did change the kind” (10), that the “luscious earth” (7) “stupifie[s]” (8) the flowers, reflects in miniature very real contemporary anxieties that English colonists might experience unprecedented physiological and ontological change as a result of their transplantation into foreign climates and environments—a danger to which the English, with their malleable complexions in geohumoral racial paradigms, were believed to be particularly susceptible.21 The impressionability of the English complexion also explains part of his contempt for crossbreeding plants for color—he has no qualms about potential adverse effects on their yield, beauty or resilience. Rather, he fears the corruption of a feminized natural purity, whether the roses’ scent or the tulips’ whiteness. His freakout about tulips learning to paint themselves recasts contemporary debates over women’s use of cosmetics, which, in addition to potentially signifying female vanity and moral turpitude, also had the alarming effect of destabilizing complexion as a meaningful index of racial and class difference.22 And indeed, several early modern theorists (most notably John Bulwer) even posited that phenotypical racial distinctions were the result of cosmetics, what was once artificial paint becoming naturalized in a proto-Lamarckian understanding of heredity.23 Further, the foreign origin of many cosmetic products provoked concern:

Through the feminized flowers becoming addicted to cosmetics and thus interlining their own cheeks, then, we see concerns about weak-willed women becoming not only consumers but also vectors of interracial mixing, even as their initial corruption is ostensibly the work of a male capitalist-scientist.

Indeed, the mower’s scornful castigation of the sailors who travel the world to track down the “Marvel of Peru” points to a critique not of European colonialism as such, but rather of the incursion of foreign flowers into European climes, and, even more particularly, of the potential for foreign plants to thus sexually contaminate English flowers. (That the white tulip is not in fact native to England is a fact that appears to elude the mower, as Robinson has pointed out.)25 Indeed, after enumerating the moral perils of these newfangled plants, the cosmeticized tulip and the Marvel of Peru, he in fact grudgingly admits

That is to say, while the mower is dubious about the importation of plants, he reluctantly admits their potential if inadvisable permissibility—until he realizes the sexual implications of such imports. Such anxieties are wrought even further by the invocation of grafting, the charge that the heedless horticultural innovator “dealt between the bark and tree / Forbidden mixtures there to see” (21–22) and “grafts upon the wild the tame” (24). Grafting was a process that, as Miranda Wilson puts it, problematically “introduc[ed] uncertainty into Renaissance distinctions between high and low, animal and plant, human and nonhuman”; to the taxonomically-minded mower, this is bad enough.26 However, we can also consider grafting as having a racial dimension as well; this becomes clear when we consider that the mower is most anxious that the wild is grafted onto the tame, the foreign or barbarous onto the domestic. Indeed, the mechanics of grafting—in which a shoot from one plant is inserted into a notch carved in the other—provide a particularly fertile ground for such anxieties about sexual scurrility and racial admixture. The fruit produced by hybridization is “forbidden,” “uncertain,” and “adult’rate,” adumbrating anxieties about species purity and legibility that will undergird the project of scientific taxonomization—“a scientific method that was developed in and through its colonial, anti-Black, and pathologizing uses,” in Kadji Amin’s words, and one that is central to the development of so-called “scientific racism” of the nineteenth century.27 And this concern at bastardized fruit, the “forbidden” outcome of these dubious mixtures, reflects the increasing discomfiture with interracial sexual relationships that develops across the seventeenth century, a trajectory that scholars like Carmen Nocentelli have demonstrated.28 Thus, the mower’s anxieties about category contamination place him squarely in the rhetorics of an emergent English chauvinism and white supremacy, anxious about the corruption of a pure English whiteness and endogamous botany, despite his laudable concerns for human exploitation of the botanical world.

This admittedly comic hysteria about the cataclysmic implications of hybrid fruit reaches its fever pitch when the mower fantasizes an Ottoman pleasure house as the scene of such deviant mixtures. Recasting nature as the “green seraglio” of a “tyrant,” attended by cherry-eunuchs, the speaker plays on contemporary, racist English depictions of the Ottoman court as the site of luxury, indulgence, tyranny, and what the early modern English would consider heathenry and likely sodomy. The figure of the eunuch signifies with particular racializing significance here, as Abdulhamit Arvas has shown:

Sodomy too was highly associated with Ottoman sexuality, as Arvas and others have well documented.30 This is to say, the speaker uses an orientalist rhetoric of the harem and its eunuch guardians to further denaturalize human incursions into botanical sex lives, positioning a natural English sexual purity against a corrupt, Eastern sexual deviance as he does so. The speaker’s critique of crossbreeding for capitalistic, greedy aims slides into a criticism of all crossbreeding as unnatural and indeed un-English, not only because of its contamination of the purity of English flora but also because it is associated (in his rhetoric) with the ostensibly debased sexual practices of the Ottoman Empire.

The answer, it seems, is recourse to a retrospective, nostalgic, and fictive English purity:

After the “enforced” rape of nature, the mower takes comfort in a pure, innocent England, one in which Nature provides for all, free of charge; in this fantasy, agricultural labor does not actually entail work but is rather facilitated by the mere presence of those stalwarts of English folklore, “fauns and fairies.” The speaker yearns for this purified, insular, idealized past—although the concealed toil, both that displaced onto the fauns and fairies and that hinted at with the sleight-of-“ancient hand” that polished the fauns’ and fairies’ statues (that is, the statues required work to create and polish) can’t totally circumvent the problems of labor this poem raises. This is a particularly weird way to end this poem, given that the speaker moves to both celebrate the work undertaken by “fauns and fairies” to “till” the meadows (35) and admire the “statues polished” (37) that “adorn the gardens” (38). By lauding not only agricultural labor but also “statues polished”—that is to say, artistic creations—the speaker praises the very artificiality he has lambasted throughout the poem. This shift to embrace artifice reminds the reader that whatever professions of naturalism the mower wishes to make can only be ironic given his occupation as mower, a figure that can hardly be said to leave the natural world to its own devices. This imagined pure, English landscape, then, is very clearly only a fantasy, one in which the mower himself has no place.

Despite the irony of this conclusion, human manipulation of plant sexuality is in this poem presented as explicitly negative, harmful to the flowers and evidence of humans’ conjunction of corrupt commerciality and sexual perversity; in this way, it might be said to evince something of a proto-environmentalist ethic. In closing, I would like to consider how the racist imperatives of the poem’s ecological agenda do not divorce it from a major strand of the mainstream Western environmental tradition, which has historically included “visions of a sublime and romantic wilderness [that] have served narratives of white supremacy that promote a right and wrong way of engaging with nature,” per Sarah J. Wald.31 While the mower does not advocate a sublime, post-Romantic vision of the natural world, he nevertheless emphatically posits a right and wrong way of engaging with nature, one that relies on romanticized fantasies of an insular, quasi-magical past. As Wald and others have shown, Western environmental movements have all too often sought to create idealized consumer, settler-colonial, cisheteronormative subjects through ideals of a pristine nature untouched by human hands, one available for the rugged (white, male) subject to appreciate and consume.32 While the whiteness of such visions is often implicit, environmentalist rhetoric often explicitly engages in racist fantasies of the ostensible harms posed by people of color, such as the “so-called population bomb that considered people of color and those from the developing world as agents of uncontrolled population growth,” which “surmised that uncontrolled population growth would promise global environmental catastrophe.”33 While the mower does not evince anxieties about overpopulation, we can see how related concerns of English botany being crowded out and replaced by foreign imports is very much on his mind. The alliance, that is, of an ostensibly environmentalist ethic and white supremacist overtones is hardly unique to Marvell, yet understanding the deep roots of this environmentalist racism is central, I argue, for continuing to combat its effects in the present.

In “The Mower against Gardens,” then, we see both a laudable skepticism vis-à-vis human exploitation of plant sexuality for commercial and capitalist ends and a troubling nascent white supremacist ethic that is leery of the contamination of the purity of English flora not merely because of the dubious pecuniary aims of the cross-breeders but also because of the greater principle of species and racial pollution this entails. These two imperatives, of rejecting the exploitation of plants for financial gain and of protecting English purity from foreign incursions, I argue, are not incidental to one another but inextricably intertwined. What are we, finally, to make of this poem? Marvell’s own position is characteristically difficult to pin down, and certainly the poem does not offer a clear-cut repudiation of the mower’s white supremacist leanings. Yet the bathos of Marvell’s mower invites us to take a critically distanced perspective from this ludic figure, whose position is undercut by his own status as a mower, that is, someone who participates in the very agricultural labor he castigates. The critique of the mower, which is both implicit and clear, is nevertheless not wholly satisfying for readers looking for an antiracist message: the poem ironizes the mower’s contradictory attitudes, rather than his racism—what comes under fire is his hypocrisy, not his position per se. What we can say is, I think, that with his characteristic elusiveness, Marvell shows intellectual incoherence in a figure who conjoins an ostensibly environmentalist ethic with white supremacy, yet he does so in ways that do not offer a significant challenge to this conjunction as such.