Sweet, intoxicating females

In the big bad world of Man, baby girls might be bad news.

But in the world of plants, the female of some species is greeted with cries of joy by both men and women.

Take the papaya tree. Unlike most trees, the papaya comes as a male tree and a female tree. So when you scrape out the little black seeds from your breakfast papaya and toss them into the garden, you don't know which tree you're likely to get.

Slowly a sapling rises from the seed, slowly the tree grows (along with the suspense). Male or female?

And then one day you see little white flowers on the papaya tree. And you curse your luck. It's a male tree. And whoever heard of a male doing anything as useful as giving fruit?

But if bigger flowers grow (out of the trunk rather than the stem) you know you've been blessed. This is the tree that will yield you sweet papayas. And in your joy, you cry jubilantly: It's a girl!

And you cut down the useless male tree and toss it among the rotting leaves without a thought.

I'm told the same is true of the marijuana plant. It is the female ganja plant that has the power to intoxicate. The (pollen carrying) male is worse that useless since its presence alone reduces the female's intoxicating gifts. Without male plants in the vicinity, females thrive by remaining unpollinated and seedless and thereby more potent. Wherever marijuana is grown under artificial conditions, the males are carefully weeded out before they can do too much damage.

If there is a moral in all this for chauvinistic males, I hope they're getting it.