A botanist’s trip to Sweden’s Lapland
THE plan was to retrace part of a journey that Carl Linnaeus made in 1732 when he was 25, from Uppsala, just north of Stockholm, to the northernmost region of Sweden, known as Swedish Lapland. Linnaeus kept a detailed journal of his travels, often called his “Lapland Journal”, with maps of the mountains, rivers and lakes, drawings and his squiggly handwriting.
I came to Swedish Lapland in part to try to get to know Linnaeus better but also to see if I was judging him unfairly. Linnaeus was the man who invented that clean two-name system, binomial nomenclature, which gave a generic and specific epithet (genus and species) to organisms – like Homo sapiens for humans.
I think what bothered me was his hubris. He believed he could take nature – holistic, fluid and constantly changing – and fragment, label and systematise it. Today more than 1.5 million have been anointed with a genus and species name.
On the trip, I was hoping to explore his virtues, among which was a clear and profound love of beauty and diversity in nature. Linnaeus left for the big adventure of his life on May 23 and travelled up the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia from Uppsala toward Finland. My travel companions and I chose to follow his longest inland route, from the coastal town of Lulea on the Bay of Bothnia.
Linnaeus’s entire trip took more than five months and covered roughly 3,200 kilometres. We had set aside about 10 days last July.
The main purpose of Linnaeus’s trip was to discover and record anything of economic interest for mother Sweden – including ethnographic information about the Sami, such as the medicinal uses of plants.
We referred to the members of our little pilgrimage as “team Linnaeus”: Hakan Stenlund, a good friend who grew up in and still lives in Lapland; Staffan Muller-Wille, a halfSwedish half-German scholar of Linnaeus; and Kristof Zyskowski, an ornithologist at the Yale Peabody Museum.
Uppsala, where we began our journey, was home to Linnaeus and the university at which he taught. From Uppsala, we flew to Lulea, a seaside town of 70,000 at the mouth of the Lule River. Linnaeus travelled from here into the mountains by foot, by horseback, by boat, often with Sami guides.
We travelled primarily by car. Among the tools I brought with me were graphite pencils, watercolours and paper. Linnaeus made many drawings as part of his fieldwork, and the Lapland journal is full of them. He did, of course, collect many plant specimens, but they were immediately flattened and did not show a flower or plant as it looks in life. He drew birds and fish and plants and Sami tools and structures, the rolling mountains, and even himself looking at the midnight sun.
On a walk along the Lule River where it met the bay, we found a species of willow, Salix pentandra, a leaf of which Linnaeus drew near this spot. Staffan plucked a leaf from the tree and laid it on the facsimile of the journal. It matched perfectly, as if Linnaeus had traced that very leaf.
Little by little we made our way north and west. About 19 kilometres from the village of Jokkmokk we saw our first reindeer, and shortly after, a sign on the roadside that we had entered the Arctic Circle. In Jokkmokk, a town of about 2,500 people, Hakan brought us to a local woman, Eva Gunnare, who gives “flavour performances”– her interpretations of different Sami foods, meant to convey indigenous plant knowledge.
We ate pine bark bread, sipped on birch sap and ate a dessert with lingonberry, crowberry, bog bilberry and blueberry. Eva also served us pieces of reindeer smoked by her Sami ex-husband, and traditional bread, or gahkku.
Onward from Jokkmokk, in Kvikkjokk, a village with fewer than 100 year-round residents, the road dead-ends in mountains and tundra. This is the point from which hikers approach Padjelanta National Park. It is a four-day trek to the vast Lake Virihaure where we would stay. In the interest of time we took a helicopter shuttle.
The tundra hills surrounding the lake and occasional patches of dwarf birch are home to more than 450 species of plants. It is hard to time the peak of blossoming here, and we were a week or so past prime, as well as a week past the true midnight sun.
We walked up to 16 kilometres a day, and often into the night. Midnight on the lake was amazing – somewhere between night and day, hovering in a platinum stillness.
In Flora Lapponica, Linnaeus describes how he named one of the alpine plants Dryas octopetala. He writes, “I have called this plant Dryas after the dryads, the nymphs that live in oaks, since the leaf has a certain likeness to the oak leaf.”
We found it, a gorgeous white flower with eight petals that quivered in the cool breeze, and I painted it back at the backpackers’ hut where we stayed. At times like this I questioned my distaste for the man and his work.
I’ve come to realise that my agitation was not really any fault of Linnaeus’s but the larger problematic relationship between word and world, names and nature – which has become a lifelong inquiry. Nature is one interconnected system, but language necessitates that we chop it up and label the pieces, giving a false impression of what it’s really like.