The day I met CARL LINNAEUS

The system we use to classify plants was created in the 18th century by a brilliant Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus. JUDITH MARY HOBBS has visited the city at the heart of his work

Any keen gardener with even a passing interest in botany and botanical names should put the small Swedish city of Uppsala on their bucket list. A visit to Uppsala is not just for the gardens, although they are beautiful. You cannot visit this special place without encountering the legacy of one of the most important figures in botany, Carl Linnaeus, as he called himself, or Carl von Linné, the name he received after his ennoblement by the King of Sweden.

Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) is known as the ‘Father of Taxonomy’, as he devised the formal two-part naming system still used today to classify all life forms, including plants and animals. It is known as the Linnaean or binomial system of nomenclature, and employs a simple hierarchy that enables us to understand relationships between living forms.

Uppsala is rather proud of Linnaeus, who was Professor of Medicine and Botany at Uppsala University from 1741 to 1778. There are statues and gardens dotted about the city honouring him, and his yellow and white residence near the university contains the Linnaeus Museum. Visitors can wander through rooms where his furniture and personal effects still sit.

Adjacent to this building, and within walking distance of the city’s beautiful double-spired cathedral, is the university’s botanic garden. A tribute to botanical history, the garden was transformed by Linnaeus after he became its director in 1741.

His contributions to the garden include glasshouses and an orangery, which he designed and had built. Heating for the glasshouses was measured using the temperature scale invented by his friend Anders Celsius. Linneaus had a role in this, too, as he inverted Celsius’s original scale, which ran from 0°C for boiling point to 100°C for freezing point. Linnaeus also organised the botanic garden (now called the Linnaeus Garden) into ordered rows, planting out the 1300 species that were known during the 1770s. He also planted the boundary of this rather small area with every known Swedish tree and shrub. At the end of each row there was a resident monkey, housed in a hut on a pole. These little huts, minus their monkeys, still stand. In 1917, the garden was fully restored, using the extensive plans left by Linnaeus and, of course, using only the 1300 known species of that era.

a brilliant career

Born in southern Sweden in the first decade of the

18th century, Linnaeus was expected to follow his father into the church, but as he spent more time out in the fields gazing at plants than studying Greek and theology, he was thought not to be bright enough to go to university. However, one of his teachers recognised his student’s special talents, and persuaded the family that Carl should study medicine and botany.

At the age of 21 he enrolled at Lund University, then a year later he moved to Uppsala University, which had a better medicine and botany department. He was soon lecturing in botany himself, as it turned out that he knew more about the subject than his lecturers!

In 1735 Linnaeus moved to The Netherlands to obtain a doctoral level degree in medicine, and he became a doctor at the age of 28. There he met the well-connected Dutch botanist Jan Frederik Gronovius. Linnaeus showed Gronovius his notes and outlined his ideas about scientific classification and the naming of plants. This encounter led to the publication in 1735 of his first work on nomenclature, titled Systema Naturae, which ran to 12 editions. Over this period the book grew from a few pages in length to become a substantial volume. A 13th edition was later published by German botanist Johann Friedrich Gmelin.