De Magnetica [...] Plantarum p. 630

and more hard-wearing than on the other. Moreover since individual plants assume the quality of the land by which they were produced, they are carried toward it by a natural appetite akin to patriotism. Hence aquatic species transplanted into torrid places mostly wither away from consumption, but those of a dry nature transplanted from arid to damp places rot, for the greater part, with hydropsy, swollen with too much moisture; while cold species in hot places shrivel and lapse into all sorts of arthritic conditions, and hot species in cold places so degenerate as to be unrecognisable; thus Theophrastus also noted that from different tranplantation there resulted such a different transformation of plants that turnip and brassica, bulrush and maize, sisymbrium [Gerard says this is a species of mint] and mint experience transformations into each other through transplantation alone. I have found by my own experiment that Nenuphar, or Nymphaea, is so desirous of moisture that if, when planted in a dry place, you put beneath it a pot full of water, it seems to lean over as if with its whole body to solicit union with the water.

Who would not be amazed at a wonderful sympathy between the male and female palm, by which they so pursue each other with a violent love, and so deeply does a sexual consciousness seem to be embedded within them, that each loves the other to distraction, nor is this longing relieved until the lovesick male has comforted it. "Nor does this philomania escape the farmers, who caress with their hands the palms abundantly planted therein and, returning to the one pining with love, touch it with their hands: then it, charmingly soothing the hand with a kiss (to quote Pliny), confesses its love, that it is excited with desire for it, and proffers remedies for this madness, whereby love is assuaged. For they dig out the flowers of the male from the trunk and put them around the head of the lovesick female, then she, lovingly cheered by this pledge of love, will be fertilised with an abundant brood." Whatever the tale from the Africans themselves, while I was staying in Malta I never once gathered that without males in Africa the females were everywhere sterile, but joined with a husband they soon bow down and rush into mutual embraces, one raising its foliage in the direction of the other, whereby the male, bristling with erect foliage, so to speak impregnates his consort the female (recognisable by her more alluring foliage) with breath, with that appearance, and with dust: so when the male flowers they climb up the spathe and shake off the dust over the fruit of the female, and once scattered with it she never loses her fruits, but strengthens and perfects them, indeed, with their foliage interwined with each other they live together both pleasantly and amicably: the reason for this can only be the excess of moisture in the male palm and the vapour which he constantly exhales, which the female is short of, (for on account of