f35v is Brussels sprouts?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

In Latin it is quercus (masculine) and hedera (feminine).  It is not univeral. English doesn't have masculine and feminine nouns at all and in my native Polish both nouns are masculine - "dąb" and "bluszcz".

Romance languages derive from Vulgar Latin, an artificial language that was made up (spontaneously or intentionally) for use by the Roman army and provincial administration. Roman soldiers were mostly of people from the provinces and would have found Latin grammar too complicated to learn.  Thus Vulgar Latin was brutally simplified, with prepositions and fixed word order instead of noun and adjective declensions,  auxiliary verbs instead of tense and mood conjugations... and only two grammatical genders instead of three.

The last change meant that the neuter nouns of Latin had to be redefined as a masculine or feminine gender.  This re-assignment proceeded rather randomly, and apparently it affected even some words that were not neuter in Latin.  Thus Romance languages often disagree on this point.

Oak and ivy are respectively masculine and feminine in Portuguese ("carvalho" and "hera"), as in Latin, as well as in Romanian (IIUC)  ("stejar" and "iedera").  But in Italian ("quercia" and "edera") they are both feminine, as they are in Spanish ("encina" and "hiedra") .  Whereas in French they are both masculine ("chêne" and "lierre") ...

So yes, the sexual symbolism in this case makes sense to me.

This is a big difference between Humanities and Sciences: explanations in the former are always much more interesting and imaginative... 

My explanation for that botanical absurdity is more pedestrian, boring even.  I believe that either the Scribe or a Retracer made a stupid mistake when drawing that part of the plant, where the two branches and the stem cross.  Below the crossing he drew the outlines as if the branches were in front of of the stem, but above the crossing he drew them as if the branches were in the background.  Thus, to "fix" the mistake, he made the branches pierce through the stem at that point...

All the best, --stolfi