It was not much of a stretch for Elmy to connect botanical sexual reproduction to humans, for the language of botany already lent itself to sexual interpretation. Carl Linnaeus, known as the father of modern taxonomy, favored the reproductive organs of the plant to order his classification system that he laid out in System of Nature, in 1735. The reproductive organs of the plant include the male stamen and the female pistil. The number of stamens in a plant determined the class to which it belonged; the number of pistils determined the plant’s subsequent order.

It was common for 18th- and early 19th-century writers and botanists to impose romantic ideals and sexual fantasies onto the male and female sexes of the plants. In 1791, Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather, wrote the two-part poem The Botanical Garden, which became the most widely read text about Linnaeus’s sexual system. Oftentimes, it reads more like a bawdy novel than a scientific text:

With vain desires the pensive ALCEA burns, And, like sad ELOISA, loves and mourns, The freckled IRIS owns a fiercer flame, And three unjealous husbands wed the dame.

In 1807, Robert John Thornton published New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carl Linnaeus, in which he romanticizes relations between plants, demonstrated most clearly with an illustration of Cupid shooting an arrow to the plants, inspiring them to love.

It also wasn’t much of a stretch for Elmy to write about botany in the first place. During the first half of the 19th century, botany was considered a proper science for women, as they cornered the publishing market for botanical texts. The historians Ann B. Shteir and Barbara Gates have shown that during this time period, women were writing about nature in unprecedented numbers. For women writers and readers, botany was a source of spiritual edification, but for many, it was also a way to cultivate womanhood through a relationship with nature.

Priscilla Wakefield’s Introduction to Botany in a Series of Familiar Letters, published in 1796, stands out as an early example of this type of writing about botany. Narrated through a series of letters between sisters in which one sister relays her governess’s botany lessons to the other, this was the first book written by a woman that provided a systematic introduction to the science. In 1801, Frances Rowden wrote A Poetic Introduction to the Study of Botany, which served as an introduction to the Linnaean system, but also as a way to teach young women the ways of morality and domestic life. These writings, like Baby Buds, almost always featured a woman or mother as the teacher and narrator in a domestic setting.

While these early botanical writers diminished the sexualized language of botany because it was inappropriate for a woman to write so openly about sex, Elmy embraced it. Some sections of Baby Buds might even be read as controversial in the way she describes male sexuality, as she attempts to shift sexual responsibility for reproduction to men—seemingly a direct response to the sexual double standard perpetuated by the CDAs. To answer the question “are the male flowers of a vegetable marrow plant needless, or do they lead a useless life; seeing that they bear no fruit?” Elmy’s narrator says that even though the male does not carry offspring within it, the male is just as responsible for sex and reproduction. And while bees transfer pollen from the male plant to the female plants, reproduction in humans is intentional for both partners.