Plants held a central place in eighteenth-century debate about physiological and economic reproduction, and one of the most important interventions came from the periphery of Europe. In Systema naturae (1735) the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus classified plants by their sexual characteristics. His sexual system played a key role in the popularization of botany during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Historians of science have often analysed it as a prominent example of Enlightenment tendencies to dichotomize and naturalize social categories of sex and gender. By contrast, this chapter argues that the sexual system constituted a satirical attack on the ancient idea of a linear scale of nature within which all beings could be arranged according to their degrees of perfection. Linnaeus’s discussions of sexual reproduction in his dietetic, physiological, ecological and economic writings reveal an antagonistic model of sexual reproduction that incorporated both hope for the seemingly boundless productivity of life, not least in the practice of acclimatizing such exotic plants as bananas, and fears of exhaustion from exuberant sexual drives and desires. The sexual system owed its success as much to its ability to capture this aspect of reproduction as to its more overt messages of order and progress.