Hurston uses the pear tree and its bees, pollen, flowers, and honey as symbols of sex and desire throughout the novel. Hurston introduces the central image with the literal pear tree that Janie observes one afternoon when she is 16. Her rapturous observation of the process of pollination—through which life is propagated for plants—reflects Janie’s sexual awakening and the desires that her grandmother deems acceptable. The pear tree also normalizes women’s sexual desire during a time when such expressions were still taboo.

Hurston has Janie express her disappointment in the lack of a sexual charge with Logan as “desecrating the pear tree” (14), meaning that he does not fulfill her vision of the ideal lover. This same sense of disappointment is apparent when Janie begins to know Joe more intimately. She recognizes from the first that he does not “represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees” (29), but his vision still attracts her. When Janie finally does encounter her ideal, Tea Cake, she describes him as “bee to a blossom—a pear tree blossom in the spring” (106). They are sexually compatible.