There he stands, young Linné, lost in thought. In one hand he holds a spade, and in the other, a flower. A bird just dropped something white on his nose. One of the 20th century’s most distinguished Swedish sculptors, Carl Eldh, has done quite a few statues of Linné. This one stands on the grounds of Waldemarsudde, Prince Eugen’s palace that faces the sea-approach to Stockholm. The King of Flowers in the garden of the Prince of Painters. Prince Eugen was one of the 20th century’s finest Swedish painters, and he loved flowers.

With the passing of time, all the world’s flora were sorted according to Linné’s sexual system. How did he get that idea? Once when the Dean Olof Celsius, was visiting the Rudbeck garden in Uppsala, seat of one of Sweden’s oldest universities, he happened to meet Carl Linnæus, who claimed to have as many as 600 plants in his own herbarium. When the Dean invited him home, Linné brought with him his entire herbarium, and was offered free board and lodging. As thanks, the Dean received, in January 1730, a manuscript with the title Præuludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum, "Foreplay to the Wedding of Plants". In it, Linné explains how he got the idea for the sexual system. He chose stamens as the means by which to divide the vegetable world into classes, because this part of each flower is so clearly delineating. Tournefort and Rivinus, on the other hand, based their system on petals; but petals are not procreative organs, and they differ in number and appearance even within the same species. Just look at how greatly white wood anemones vary! But according to Linné, the number of stamens determined the class of a plant, and within classes orders were determined by the number of pistils present. To especially emphasise the similarity of plants’ sex organs to those of humans, the manuscript showed an illustration of the Dog's Mercury (Mercurialis perennis), whose flowers are either male or female. In the naivistic drawing, an unruly wind can be seen blowing so that pollen swirls through the air and falls on the pistils, fertilising them.

In the spring, the Dog's Mercury can be seen blooming in its modest fashion. This species is depicted on Swedish one-hundred crown notes, as is the title of the manuscript: Præuludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum.

Linné’s love of his native district undoubtedly inspired his love of flowers. Just look at the meadows near his childhood home, Råshult, in Småland province in southern Sweden, which even today is still covered by patches of farmland, trimmed trees, and meadows as rich as the loveliest gardens. Late in the summer, when the meadows are trimmed with scythes, the earth becomes poor in nutrients. Paradoxically, though, this is especially beneficial to beautiful flowers.

In 1730, Dean Olof Celsius presented Sweden’s Queen Ulrika Eleonora the Younger with a neatly written manuscript entitled Flora Uplandica sive Catalogus plantarum. But not only had he listed the plants found in Uppland province, he had collected them in a herbarium which today is still preserved at the Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet (the Swedish Museum of Natural History) in Stockholm. Between a couple of pages beside a dried plant, Olof Celsius pressed the butterfly whose life was linked to the flower in question. You can still see the lustre of the butterfly’s wings.

Olof Rudbeck the younger, professor of botany, gave Linné the assignment of presenting for some students the plants in the academic garden at Uppsala. To free the students from having to take notes, Linné himself made lists. In 1730, the lists conformed to Tournefort’s system, but the list he signed in May 1731 was based entirely on his own sexual system.

Linné, who was born in May 1707, noted in his autobiographical jottings that he had arrived at all the essential aspects of the make-up of flowers before he reached the age of 23.

The Dog's Mercury, with its individual plants that are either male or female, seems to be the flower that inspired him most.

In his autobiographical notes from the year 1730, it says: "Linnæus commenced using the Excursiones Botanicas at private Colleges, and thus acquired an abundance of Collegians, giving him the means whereby he might procure clothing. He has also had the opportunity of using Professor Rudbeck’s beautiful library of botany, and to constantly pore over his matchlessly and splendidly drawn Swedish Birds. Now, his days are spent in work on the Disciplines, and his nights in devising the new System and the Reformation that he has commenced in Botany. Now, Linnæus has begun writing his Bibliotheca Botanica, his Classes Plantarum, his Critica Botanica and his Genera Plantarum, so that he might not misspend a single minute as long as he be in Uppsala." This quotation is taken from the first issue, published in 1823 by Adam Afzelius, of Linné’s writings about himself. That he refers to himself in the third person is not a sign of egocentricity; it was simply the fashion to do so in diaries of the 1700s.

We recognise the titles mentioned here by Linné in later editions of his work.

At the New Year, 1735, Linnæus travelled abroad. First, however, he visited his birthplace in the south-western part of the province of Småland to grieve for his mother, Christina, who had died the year before at the age of 45. Today, an imposing portrait of her hangs in a conspicuous place on the wall of Linné’s summer home, Hammarby, which lies south of Uppsala. She is holding a flower in her hand. Nevertheless, she was heartbroken when the young Linné told her that he intended to pursue the study of flowers, instead of becoming a pastor.

Linné left Sweden at the beginning of 1735, and after an adventurous journey by sea, he reached Holland. There, he showed the manuscript of his first Systema Naturæ to Johan Fredric Gronovius, a medical doctor, who subsequently paid to have it printed. In it are presented the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms. Naturally, the vegetable kingdom begins with Clavis Systematis Sexualis—the key to the sexual system in 24 classes. By way of example, the eighth class, Octandria, is described by Linné as eight men in the same bridal chamber with one bride. Thus, the flowers in this class have eight stamens and one pistil. Many of the classes’ of flowers are described by Linné as being hermaphrodite, which they are. Stamens and pistils—male and female sex organs—are often found in the same flower, however, as a rule self-fertilisation is hindered. In the Syngenesia class, the males have used their sex organs to create an alliance, Linné writes. The stamens, with their pollen-laden anthers, are joined to form a pipe. In the Polygamia class, those who are "properly married" have their bridal chamber on the disk, whereas the abandoned harlots’ bridal chamber is around the rim, where they will be fertilised by "married" males. On being fertilised, these rim-flowers generate seeds. Look at the dandelion, Taraxacum officinale. Most people see the dandelion flower as being a single entity, but that is not the case! Each dandelion consists of many flowers gathered into one basket. Look at the yarrow or milfoil, Achillea millefolium. On the flower-basket’s disk are hermaphrodite, funnel-shaped flowers. Round them are tongue-shaped, female rim-flowers. The dandelion and the milfoil belong today to the family Compositae, also known as Asteraceae. In general, Linné’s classes were replaced during the 1800s by "families", thus making them more compatible with Darwin’s newly-launched theory of evolution. If we use the sexual system constructed by Linné, the family Compositae or Asteraceae can be assigned either to the class Syngenesia (since the stamens’ anthers have grown together into a pipe), or to the class Polygamia (since it consists of baskets filled with many flowers). This illustrates the weakness of classes in the sexual system.

Curiosity drove Linné to examine the sex organs of plants, and he proceeded from what he knew about human sex organs. He was inspired by a 1727 newspaper article about the opening speech of the public lectures that Sébastien Vaillant was holding in Paris on the sexuality of plants—the stamen that spreads its pollen like sperm, and the pistil, whose ovary resembles a womb. Never before had anyone designed a key for qualifying the vegetable kingdom by describing the sex organs of flowers, but Linné succeeded thanks to his keen insight and talent for systematic arrangement. Imagine the genius of Linné, to have held fast to the idea of a sexual system, even though flowers have such richly varying ways of reproducing! Who besides him would have thought of calling the milfoil’s rim-flowers harlots?

In 1736, Linné went to England to see the gardens of Chelsea and Oxford. Even today, the English Apothecary Society’s Chelsea Garden lies in London, and plays host to a tall Chinese temple tree. In the autumn, the tree’s yellowed leaves lie decoratively on the grass looking just as they always have for 200 million years. In pre-historic times, the species was spread throughout the world; today, it only grows wild, in Southern China. However, in the Chelsea Garden in autumn, its pale green fruits, large as plums, lie on the ground spreading a stale, rancid odour, which attracts animals to spread its seeds. Here we see an archetype of how the animal and vegetable domains are mutually dependent upon each other. The temple tree in the Chelsea Garden was planted as late as the beginning of the 1900s, but the species as such was already imported into Europe in Linné’s day. Rare plants from every part of the earth were introduced by the East India Company’s sailing ships.

At the time Linné visited the Chelsea Garden, the gardener, Philip Miller, had an unusually fine collection of exotic flowers, and he and Linné agreed to exchange seeds and any articles they were to publish. Many years later, on 29 August 1763, Philip Miller sent Linné a despairing letter. Miller had understood from Linné’s correspondence that the latter had not received the items Miller had sent him, not for a long time. In October of 1762, Miller had given Linné’s favourite disciple, Daniel Solander, 100 different types of seeds, mainly from plants that were not included in Linné’s famous work Species Plantarum. The package, which bore four seals, was addressed direct to Linné. Moreover, on the many occasions when Solander visited the garden, Miller had given him samples of plants that he had good reason to believe Linné had never seen. He had also insistently entreated Solander to write and ask how many illustrations and pages Linné needed from The Gardener’s Dictionary. Between 1755 and 1760, Philip Miller had published Figures of the most Beautiful, Useful and Uncommon Plants described in the Gardener’s Dictionary. This work consisted of coloured illustrations, masterfully done, with texts describing the unusual plants in The Gardener’s Dictionary, a work that was printed in several editions. In the Royal Swedish Academy of Science’s first essay, Findings on the Planting of Plants, based on Nature, published in the spring of 1739, Linné mentions the huge volume with appreciation.

It is apparent from Miller’s despairing letter of the 23 August 1763 that he had asked Solander to find out which illustrations Linné needed to complete his copy of the work. But Solander had informed him that Linné’s reply had been lost with a ship that had sunk. "By his behaviour, we may assume that Dr Solander has used us both very badly," writes Miller, with scarcely restrained wrath. This alone can explain something that has puzzled many scholars, namely, that Linné suddenly disowned his favourite student, Solander. Unfortunately, Linné’s own copy of Miller’s illustrations, which is kept by the Linnéean Society in London, has not retained its beauty over the years.

From England, Linné progressed in 1735 to the garden of the prosperous banker George Clifford at Hartecamp, an estate west of Amsterdam. From then on, Linné lived like a prince. Employed as the master of the garden, he was able to describe all the plants and herbs the garden contained, and buy the books that the library lacked. Via the East India Company, Clifford was able to obtain plants from all round the world. The plants, and his writing, occupied Linné day and night. He succeeded in getting Musa, the banana tree, to bloom, and he believed that the banana was the choicest plant in all of nature. In 1736, he published the book Musa Cliffortiana, which gave eloquent arguments for the importance of this fruit. What did Eve give Adam in Paradise? Was it really an apple? No, it was surely a banana! What had Alexander the Great given his troops when they languished? Why, bananas! Musa Cliffortiana is accompanied by two fold-out illustrations of the banana tree in its entirety, and of its fruit and flowers.

For a hundred years, gardeners had been making literally fruitless attempts to get banana trees to bloom in Dutch gardens. In planting Clifford’s plant, which came from Surinam, Linné used only the finest earth, and arranged conditions that mimicked the plant’s home climate. First, the banana was allowed to remain dry for a long time, then plenty of water was showered on it, while at the same time, the greenhouse was sealed and heated up. At that point, Musa began to bloom, and scholars from all over Europe made the pilgrimage to Clifford’s garden to witness the miracle.

At Clifford’s, Linné produced his one magnificent volume, Hortus Cliffortianus in 1737. In the presentation edition, the allegorical frontispiece illustration—which is in colour—shows Mother Earth sitting astride princely-looking lions, with a crown of ivy on her head, and keys in her hand for locking and unlocking the garden. Mother Earth is flanked by Diana the Huntress, wearing the moon as her jewel, and the standing Apollo, who enters with the light. If you can see the resemblance Apollo bears to Linné, the allegory is complete!

The work includes twenty illustrations drawn by Georg Dionysus Ehret, and executed by Wandelaar in beautiful copperplate engraving that allows for a rich black tone, as if they were wood-engravings. Wandelaar also drew some of the originals on which the copper engravings were based, for example, the sticky, unpleasant flower that Linné called Sigesbeckia because Johann Siegesbeck had criticised his Systema Naturæ, published in 1735. Later, when Linné arranged botany authors according to military rank, he placed himself as the generals’ general, while Siegesbeck figures at the bottom of the hierarchy as a lowly sergeant-major.

Linné named a lovely flower after William Turner, a delightful botanist of the 1500s. By giving simple names to each plant, Turner was a predecessor to Linné, whose simple, binary terminology replaced long, descriptive Latin names many years after Hortus Cliffortianus was published. Like Linné, Turner was extremely interested in what each plant was called by common folk, as these names often said something about the plant’s use as food or medicine. Linné had a true gift for working systematically and making himself brief. How much more easy wouldn’t his work have been with a computer’s help! All the information he stored in his books was written using a goose-quill pen that had been hardened by being plunged alternately into glowing-hot sand and cold water. To write with it, one dipped the pen in ink, which was concocted of gall-apple, vitriol and gummi arabicum. The edition of Species Plantarum that was published in 1753—along with Genera Plantarum, which describes the plant families and was published in 1754—laid the groundwork for the binary name designations of our time. In Species Plantarum, Linné also provided a list of the long, descriptive Latin names that other botanists had used before him, thus giving the reader help in deciphering the Latin phrases in older books. Thanks to their descriptive characterisation of each flower, these phrases are very illuminating for anyone who has mastered Latin. They bear a certain resemblance to the Latin used today in medicine. To the zoologist, the source of today’s binary name designations is the tenth edition of Systema Naturæ (1758). Thus, it is not only the innovation and simplicity of the sexual system that he created which has made Linné famous; he cemented his role as the describer of the world’s plants and animals by continuously producing new lists of species using his simple and standardised name designations. From all over the world, his disciples supplied him with natural-history specimens. At length, Linné’s old acquaintance Miller in London’s Chelsea Garden was obliged, as was everyone else, to accept Linné’s designations. Over the years, Miller grew more and more humble in his letters to the Flower King; nevertheless, he was unusually late in accepting Linné’s terminology.

In the autumn of 1738, Linné moved to Stockholm. He became engaged to marry Sara Moræa, and his father-in-law to be, who was the city physician in Falun, a town in Dalecarlia, wanted Linné to make his fortune as a doctor before the wedding took place. In contrast to big cities such as London, we can still discern today the natural landscape in Stockholm. The view over Pålsundet towards Riddarholmen (the Knights’ Island) is very much the same today as it was when Linné approached the city.

Liljebaggar are still mating in the brewer Jochum Ahlstedt’s garden on Långholmen, an island in Stockholm to which Linné led botanical excursions from Hornstull, the south-western entrance to the city. Carl Gustaf Tessin had arranged a position for Linné as a lecturer at Riddarhuset (the House of Knights). In the winter, Linné lectured on the mineral realm, and in the summer if the weather was fine, he would conduct Sunday tours, serving as a guide in the landscape around Hornstull. A notice to this effect appeared on the door to Riddarhuset, along with the information that the tour’s purpose was to admire Nature, the Work of God. Without that saving clause, the church might have taken offence and interpreted the tour as work, a violation of the sabbath. The liljebagge - Lilioceris merdigera - squeaks if you touch it. Linné’s second edition of Fauna Svecica (1761) was enlarged with a section on insect fauna that was even more comprehensive than the rest of the book. In it, the liljebagge is presented under the name Chrysomela merdigera, and today, the insect quite correctly belongs to the family Chrysomelidae. Linné described the bright red beetle in great detail, mentioning that it is found on lilies. In Ahlstedt’s seventeenth-century garden, which was planted near a country estate, Alstavik, the liljebaggar are drawn to the Turk’s-cap lilies that are found there in a white variant. The country estate itself is still visible as part of the Spinning House, which was built in 1724 to house female prisoners. Stockholm has not only a living culture, but old buildings as well. In the spring of 1739, Carl Linnæus founded, together with Mårten Triewald and a few others, The Royal Academy of Science. They drew lots, and Linné won, making him the society’s first chairman. Today, there is a plaster medallion hanging in the Academy, which depicts Linné at the height of his powers. With his wig removed, he resembles a Roman Senator.

In Stockholm, which during Linné’s time had some 50,000 inhabitants, Linné worked as a physician. He had about sixty private patients every day, mostly young men. According to his autobiographical notes, the men suffered from "the French sickness", and he cured each of them by prescribing one bottle of Rhine wine per day for a fortnight. His results were excellent, considering that as a rule the "French sickness" was syphilis, a venereal disease that cannot be cured by alcohol. But the disease can progress through symptom-free periods, and Linné’s charisma may well have contributed to his patients’ satisfaction. Aside from his private practice, Linné had a couple of hundred bed-ridden, gravely ill sailors and boatswains who were housed in the barracks of the Swedish navy on Skeppsholmen, the navy base of that time. One of his superiors there was Admiral Evert Didrik Taube, who owned Kungshatt, an island a short way out in Lake Mälaren. On the island, Linné described for the first time how mistletoe spread. He writes that the thrush does itself a great disservice, because thrushes eat the berries of the mistletoe. This causes them to have diarrhoea and defecate the berries along with a viscous secretion. Where the birds expel the berries, new mistletoe trees take root. In the 1700s, mistletoe berries were used to make bird-glue, which was used to trap thrushes and other edible small birds. This is the explanation behind the somewhat cryptic Swedish saying: "The thrush shits his own tragic end."

Today, mistletoe (Viscum album) is no longer found on Kungshatt, where it grew in the island’s grand, cross-shaped avenue that led from the shore up to the wings of the estate. But they still grow on Ådö, an island where Arvid Horn had his residence. In the early days of Swedish party politics, Horn was the leader of the party called "The Caps". Linné’s patron, Carl Gustaf Tessin, led the opposing party, known as "The Hats", thus Linné was jokingly referred to as the Hats’ physician-in-ordinary, a title otherwise reserved for the king’s personal physician. However, Linné did later become the king’s private physician, and he was very proud of it, too.

From the highest point on Kungshatt, one can see a little island in the passage where Lake Mälaren flows into Stockholm. Today, the island is called Fläsket, but on the maps of the 1700s, its name is Fläsklösan. From this rocky little island, Linné was to describe the cross-breeding of Spiked and Long-leaved Speedwell, i.e., a hybrid of Veronica spicata and longifolia. A few examples of the pressed plant, known as Veronica hybrida, are kept at Burlington House in London, to which Linné’s widow sold his vast herbarium. With some surprise, we can see how Linné—unusually enough—has made a note in his unmistakably graceful hand, of where the plant was found: "in insula Maelari Fläsklösan". But was he actually there himself? Of course. In Flora Svecica, he wrote: "It grows on the island Fläsklösan in Lake Mälaren where it was once collected by me." Today, the hybrid is still found on Fläsklösan, but it also blooms on what was originally a rocky outcrop in front of the functionalist apartment buildings high up on Reimersholme, an island south of Långholmen.

On his excursions from Hornstull to the garden at Alstavik, Linné must have seen the hålnunneört which he calls in Flora Svecica, Fumaria (today, Corydalis) bulbosa, with its hollow root—radice cava. Tall, red and beautiful as an orchid, it blooms early in spring and then disappears without a trace. The flower’s grey-green-lilac supporting leaves, or bracts, are whole, as opposed to those of most other Fumitory plants, whose bracts are interposed, like the fingers of a hand. In the past, Corydalis cava was mostly used as a cure for worms. It was also taken to counter muscular spasms, vertigo, high blood pressure and cramps.

Another red-flowered and directly edible plant, at least in Linné’s time, is the jordmöss, the root bulb of the Tuberous-rooted Pea, which was mentioned as early as the 1600s in Schering Rosenhane’s Oeconomica. The Tuberous -rooted Pea—Lathyrus tuberosus—shows off its red flowers all summer long, and a good bit into the autumn. Its bulb tastes like edible chestnuts. The Tuberous-rooted Pea was grown in Marieberg, a section of Kungsholmen Island, by Mårten Triewald, who, along with Linné, never believed that their friend Johan Ahlströmer’s talk about the new-fangled potato would lead anywhere. They both found the jordmöss superior. Today, the knölvialen is a rarity, but we can still see the flower as a living reminder of an older culture, growing in mud quarries on Kungshatt, from which mud was taken to supply a brickworks long into the 1900s. All the digging there woke the tuberous roots to life. The same thing happened south of Rosendal’s gardens when a lawn was removed to serve as a turf roof for an old house in Skansen, the nearby open-air museum. There again, the knölvialen was awakened to life, and its red flowers can be seen all summer long. Alströmer, who was a member of the small circle that founded the Royal Academy of Science, might well have had his potato-cellar where Restaurant Diana’s charming dining-cellar is located today. Alströmer’s father-in-law, Johan Clason, let Alströmer live in a building he owned in the block in which the restaurant is located.

Just as they do today, the islands of Kastellholmen and Skeppsholmen lay in the inlet into Stockholm Harbour, but in those days, they were filled with the buildings and crews that served the admiralty. On the shores of these small islands lay dry-docked warships, others lay at anchor in the surrounding waters. As physician to the admiralty, Linné had as his immediate superior Theodor Ankarcrona, who later became an admiral as well as a county governor. Ankarcrona was of course voted into the Royal Swedish Academy of Science. Linné’s task as physician to the admiralty was to replace expensive imported medicines with home-grown varieties. He replaced lemons with berberis—Berberis vulgaris—whose small, oval, blazing-red berries had been used for many years to combat scurvy, even though at that time, it was not known that scurvy was caused by a lack of vitamin C. The Swedish East India Company had just introduced to Stockholm a new alcoholic beverage, called "punsch" in Swedish. Theodor Ankarcrona got the bright idea of taking a short-cut to good health by combining the two new products, and soon became famous through the sale of Theodor Ankarcrona’s berberispunsch. The acidic berries lightened and freshened up the heavy sweetness of the punsch. A law that still stands in Sweden today stipulates that the berberis bush is to be rooted out, because it acts as an intermediary host for black rust, a disease that attacks grain-fields. This, combined with the bush’s thorniness and the insignificant size of its berries should be sufficient to hinder berberispunsch from taking the world by storm the way the Swedish-made Absolute Vodka has done. Berberis bushes are still growing on Ankarcrona’s estate, Runsa, which is a handsome manor-house from the 1600s that lies on the shores of the water-route—a route used by the Vikings—between Stockholm and Uppsala. One quite often sees berberis growing alongside ancient waterways. The berberis bush seems to have been introduced into Europe by the Moors at a very early date.

In the Royal Swedish Academy of Science’s first essay, Findings on the Planting of Plants based on Nature, Linné names medicinal plants such as motherwart—Leonorus cardiaca—which was used against menstrual cramps as well as to retard agitated heartbeat. In this essay, Linné makes his appearance as an ecologist, one hundred years before the term was even thought up. He argues that one must know everything about the original place in which a plant has grown, its height above sea-level, the soil in which it grew, and its native climate in order to plant it successfully. During its first two decades, the Academy of Science held its meetings in Riddarhuset. On the second floor opposite the Hall of Knights lay the Academy’s oval-shaped lecture hall, Auditorium Illustre. Unfortunately, it was demolished at an early date, and offices have since been built on its site.

After having rented lodgings from 1738 on in the home of Wilhelm Meister, a merchant, Linné moved into the Tessin Palace, which today is the residence of Stockholm’s county governor.

Already in the summer of 1739, Linnæus had made so much money as a lecturer, excursion guide, and physician (both private and to the admiralty), that Johan Moræus permitted his daughter to marry him. The wedding took place at Sveden, an estate east of Falun in Dalecarlia, in a charming wedding-cottage that was renovated in 1997. On the ground floor, the walls are painted with biblical scenes. The house is spartanically furnished, and on the floor above, light falls through the window on an empty table and broad floor-planks.

Some months after the wedding, Linné returned to Stockholm and his work with patients and the Academy of Science. He had made a name for himself as a chest-and-lung specialist, and was now engaged by the Royal couple, Fredrik I and Ulrika Eleonora the Younger. The king had set the queen up at Ulriksdal Palace a short distance outside Stockholm, so that he might be able to spend some time in peace and quiet with his mistress Hedvig Taube, a lovely young woman, who was the daughter of Admiral Evert Didrik Taube.

Linné, who seems to have cured the queen’s troublesome cough, visited her at Ulriksdal. He took a look around the rather newly built orangerie, but he probably did not see the Loach—Barbatula barbatula—in the brook nearby, although he did write that it lives in Lake Mälaren. The Loach, a small fish that swims to the surface of the water in the event of nocturnal electrical storms, was probably imported from King Fredrik’s home district in Germany, to be eaten as a delicacy. Today, the fish is closely monitored by the World Wildlife Fund, since it is only found in a few waterways in Sweden. The little fish, which must have clear, running water to live in, has always been found in the several-mile-long brook that runs between the vast housing-area built on Järvafältet, a large field north of Stockholm. The brook flows under Route 4 and finally out into the Baltic, south of Ulriksdal Palace.

In 18th-century manor-house environments, we also find the yellow-flowered wild tulip, Tulipa sylvestris, which was probably the first tulip that was brought to Europe via Bologna in the 1500s. Linné’s kinsman, Emanuel Swedenborg, looked upon these cultivated plants from a forgotten age as the expression of the wishes of the departed. These two great builders of systems during the 1700s were indeed related. In Sara Moræa, Linné had married a second cousin of Swedenborg, and the wedding had taken place at Swedenborg’s old family seat, the Sveden estate.

Naturally, Linné saw to it that Swedenborg was voted into the Academy of Science. As time went by, the two men grew apart from each other, and we can surmise that the Academy had little sympathy for Swedenborg’s numerous encounters with angels. In other words, Linné and Swedenborg increasingly came to work on opposite sides of reality’s boundaries. It is in this context that a minor mystery arises concerning the bleeding heart, Dicentra spectabilis. Researchers into Swedenborg’s life have described how bleeding hearts grew in the spirit observer’s garden in southern Stockholm. Researcher’s into Linné’s life have assured us that Linné tried in vain to get a glimpse of the bleeding heart in real life, although he did name the flower. But the flower he saw was pressed. Can it have been so easy for Linné as merely visiting the garden of his older kinsman Swedenborg for a glimpse of the longed-for revelation? Today, Swedenborg stands preserved for eternity as a bust at Mariatorget, a square in the south of Stockholm.

According to legend, Swedenborg took over Linné’s flat when the latter moved to Uppsala in the autumn of 1741 where he had been appointed a professor of medicine. But there is no evidence in the tax rolls that Swedenborg ever lived in the flat. On the other hand, the records plainly show that Linné lived there. Between the building in which the flat was located, Little Räntmästarhuset, and its larger sister building, Great Räntmästarhuset, was a garden. Today, the whole complex has been joined together in a pastiche of 18th century styles in which a relief of Linné has been incorrectly placed all the way out at the far end. The garden is gone, and the relief should have been placed where Little Räntmästarhuset stood, at the other end of the complex.

A replica of Swedenborg’s garden pavilion has also been erected in the wrong place. It should have been placed in the block’s most westerly part, but that was technically impossible. Nevertheless, this falsification is wholly redeemed by the garden’s beautiful landscaping and by the initiative that has been taken to remind us of Swedenborg and the spirituality that the 1700s combined with an exquisite aesthetic. Today, Swedenborg’s original garden pavilion stands at Skansen, the open-air museum in Stockholm.

Let us dwell a short while on Linné’s article—which is both sensual and ecologically sound— Findings on the Planting of Plants, based on Nature, in which the Aloë and its family are examined. Today, the Aloe is a potted plant used for decorative purposes. Cut into its thick leaves, and healing juices pour forth. The article also mentions the ancient medicinal plant horehound, Marrubium vulgare, which has been used for thousands of years to relieve coughs and chest illnesses. An old-fashioned cure-all, it is said to suppress coughing, to be mildly sedative, to strengthen the stomach, to drive out gallstones, to soothe cramps and bring on menstruation, while at the same time being useful externally on inflamed sores. Today, it is rarely seen but can be found near old buildings on Gotland and Öland, the large Swedish islands in the Baltic. Its tiny white flowers remind us of the 18th century’s genius for richness of ornament and detail.

We can also tell from "Findings on the Planting of Plants, based on Nature" that in 1739, Linné made the acquaintance of a cultivator of arctic raspberries whose fields lay in what is today mid-town Stockholm. One of the things Linné mentions in his laconic style of writing is Experimento D. Aschelini, which means "Mr Asklin’s experiment". Asklin covered his arctic raspberries—Rubus arcticus—with snowdrifts so huge that they remained until summer. Then, just as in the plant’s home in the north of Sweden, when the snow melted, the plant was wrenched from intense cold direct into warm, stable summer weather. Its gorgeous light-red flowers burst into bloom, and later yielded the finest-tasting berries Linné had ever enjoyed.

When the Royal Swedish Academy of Science was founded, Linné of course saw to it that his father-in-law Moræus was voted in. As it was the custom for each member to contribute a paper to the Academy’s documents, Johan Moræus published a story, a tragic one, that dealt with some men in a garden who were enticed to eat wolf’s bane—Aconitum napellus—on the false pretext that it would protect against scurvy. The first one to eat of it, a priest, becomes quite beside himself. The mystical herb is then presented for Janssen, a surgeon, who is considered a medical expert. He eats of the plant and confirms that it is a useful herb against scurvy. Then he drinks some beer, and eats still more of it, declaring that it must surely be a good purgative for the body. The surgeon also tries to convince, Ternsteen, his fellow-traveller, of the plant’s virtues, but the latter is doubtful and eats only a little of it. The surgeon then points out that the leaves would be good in a salad, which convinces Ternsteen to put some leaves in his pocket, after which the two men set out for the next farm. As the wagon crosses the fields, Ternsteen gets a pain in his stomach, and becomes thirsty. He curses Janssen who has lured him into eating the leaves, but Janssen accuses him of being soft, and demands to have the leaves that were saved to make a salad. Janssen eats them up, and falls asleep. After a while, Ternsteen glances towards the rear of the wagon, and bids the surgeon wake up, he has lost his hat. "I know that full well, it’s lying here!" says he, and quickly falls asleep again. On their arrival, he cannot be roused. His hands and his forehead are icy cold. He groans a little, and Ternsteen pours some wine into his mouth. After a while, Janssen gives up the ghost. When he is examined, he is blue around the throat and back, and the rest of his body is marbled in blue. Moræus writes that the surgeon’s "private limb" has burst, but his face shows no change. Thus ill it went for the surgeon who believed that the blue-flowered wolf’s bane was a health-giving plant. In fact, all the parts of this plant are highly poisonous! The English botanist of the 1500s, William Turner, whose name Linné gave to an African flower, published the books he did simply because the scanty knowledge of plants among apothecaries in his day was killing patients. As we know, all medicines were derived from the vegetable kingdom, and during Linné’s years in Stockholm, he published long lists of active herbs in the documents of the Academy of Science. He also revealed that apothecaries often gave patients who suffered from the shivers lilac, which had no effect, instead of cinchona bark, which contains quinine. These patients were in fact suffering from malaria, which was a common illness in Sweden, and especially in the Lake Mälaren valley, during the 1700s. The apothecaries took great offence when it was revealed that they were making good profits by distributing ineffective medicines.

Among the gardens in Stockholm’s surroundings that Linné visited, is Charles de Geer’s well-kept rococo park in Stora Wäsby, an area north of the city. Today, Route 4 cuts straight through the estate’s tree-lined avenue, while the train between Uppsala and Stockholm clips off the lower part of the park. Nevertheless, the estate and its park still form a grand ensemble. Charles de Geer wrote a large, richly illustrated book about insects. Spiders were given names by Carl Clerck, who accompanied Linné on some of his Stockholm wanderings. At Linné’s estate, Hammarby, we can see black-and-red-striped hemipterion beetles mating in early summer. We can also see how the strimlusen (Graphosoma lineatum) is drawn to chervil (Myrrhis odorata). But this is an anachronism, in that chervil is an old herb in Sweden, whereas the strimlusen immigrated to Sweden sometime in the mid-1900s.

Linné terminated his sojourn in Stockholm in 1741, at the last minute. As physician to the admiralty, he could easily have become involved in the unfortunate war of revenge that the Hats instigated against Russia in that year. But he was lucky. In parliament, the four estates of the realm had received a document from the Deputations of Manufacture and Commerce, stating that if various unknown plants and insects, as well as varieties of earth and minerals, could be found, they might be used in dyeing, in manufacturing and in generally improving the national economy. Thus, the four estates assigned Linné to travel to Gotland and Öland, Sweden’s islands in the Baltic, which were thought to be of special interest in this respect, as were parts of the mainland province Västergötland. One might well wonder who introduced these insightful observations, but we do have a clue. During his years in Stockholm, Linné had taken to dining more and more often at the table of bank superintendent Rutensköld, who just happened to be a member of the Deputations of Manufacture and Commerce. In any event, in 1741, Linné embarked for Öland, and later in the summer, for Gotland, where he found, near a church, the Swedish hayseed, the Yellow Sickle Medick (Medicago falcata), which he had already mentioned in the Academy’s initial document in 1739. But now he fully realised that this yellow-flowered plant could nourish animals as well as infertile soil. To be sure, he may also have been urgently searching for some particularly attractive findings.

Linné’s provincial journeys were not made for the sake of research, but rather because, above all, the Hat party was calling for the exploitation of domestic resources. It was their belief that a large, sparsely populated country such as Sweden had much to offer in its widespread arable districts and woodlands.

Not much came of the efforts to introduce the Yellow Sickle Medick. Many years later, though, the Alfalfa—Medicago sativa—fared much better on being introduced from the European continent. Today, especially in Scania province in the south of Sweden, we can see wild hybrids of the Alfalfa and Yellow Sickle Medick. They cover the sandy fields around the Ale Stones in Kåseberga. There, near southern Scania’s shores, is a ship-shaped burial mound, and in the fields around it we can see, among the Lucerne, the Common Rest-Harrows relatively large flowers, which resemble pale-red sails. The Common Rest-Harrow—Ononis repens—is a weed that Linné encountered in profusion everywhere as he travelled through Scania in 1749. The countryside Linné travelled through in those days was a poor one, in which houses stood rotting directly on the ground, without stone foundations. Today the poverty there is of a different kind. The soil has been dyked away, and the groundwater level has sunk due to artificial irrigation. Throughout Sweden, vast areas of land, virtual deserts, are devoted to industrial farming and spruce forests, and they have crowded out the biological diversity of the wetlands and small-scale agricultural districts that were there before them.

In the 1700s, the smallest straw of grass was scrutinised to see what use could be made of it. Knowledge of species was a necessity for staying alive. Every plant that was pressed for use in research was dried and glued in place with fish-glue on durable rag-paper. Under the sample itself, a flower-pot was drawn. Utility and aesthetics went hand in hand.

At Hammarby, Linné’s summer home, a branch from the temple tree Ginkgo biloba is hung on the wall. It is said that the branch came from an ancient tree in Harderwijk, in Holland, where Linné acquired his doctorate by writing what later proved to be an unsuccessful thesis on malaria. He believed then that malaria was spread by means of the clay particles in water. But of course it was not possible using the technology of the time to determine that malaria plasmodia are transmitted into the human blood-stream via mosquitoes.

Indeed, Linné did make the odd mistake, as when he believed that swallows spent the winter at the bottom of the sea. But even these rare mistakes could be difficult to correct. A long time went by before anyone dared describe the flight of swallows to warmer climes. Nevertheless, this explanation had a note in its margin to the effect that one or another swallow may very well have spent the winter at the bottom of the sea, just as Linné said.

Amid the cool shadows that fall inside Linné’s summer house, a ray of sun beams on his coat-of-arms, which hangs grandly over a door. At the center of the device is an egg; what could be more fitting for the man who investigated Nature’s procreation? Linné was knighted in 1757 by King Adolf Fredrik, but it took many years before Riddarhuset, the House of Knights, would accept his new-minted title. The nobility were sorely peeved with Adolf Fredrik and his temperamental consort, Lovisa Ulrika, believing that too many people had been ennobled by them. It is said that the queen wanted to tutor one of Linné’s four daughters; however, Linné declined to send his daughter to court. The queen asked him rhetorically if he did not think her fit to raise a young woman. "No", replied Linné, "I think not". Lovisa Ulrika was often amused by the genius Linné’s candid answers. At Hammarby, his daughters’ portraits are hung round a drawing depicting a whale that has not yet clipped her calf’s umbilical cord.

It was Linné who arranged the king’s natural history collection. The book Museum Adolphi Frederici (1754), which contains 33 illustrations of objects in Adolf Fredrik’s collection, is comparable to Linné’s one great work Hortus Cliffortianus. Gradually, though, the royal couple’s interest in natural history began to wane, which worried Linné greatly. However, being awarded the Order of the North Star was some comfort. In a bust sculptured by Jonas Forsslund in 1807 and displayed today in the Royal Swedish Academy’s main building, the ageing Linné is shown wearing the Order of the North Star. Still, the greatest monument to Linné are all the flowers that bloom wild in fields and cultivated in orderly gardens. If you would see his monument, then, look around you! You will see flowers beloved from the 1700s on like the hollyhock, Althaea rosea. Late into the autumn, meadow saffron—Colchicum autumnale—can be seen with its nude, red-blue flower, growing among yellowing leaves in black loam. All of them have been described by Linné, who gave a lyrical account of them and looked upon them as a gift from a generous God.

As a complement to Linné’s descriptions of flowers, take a trip to his beloved summer house, Hammarby. Wander, even as he did, along a pleasant, winding path and follow the village road up to the Denmark church. Rest halfway, as he did, on the rock that resembles a bench.

Visit his house in the old Rudbeck garden in Uppsala. Perhaps, in your mind’s eye, you might suddenly see him lecturing for a modern audience, describing the sexual system’s 24 classes, with the flowerless, seedless cryptogams he held in such disdain coming last among them.

We can conclude with Linné’s large, white house in Sävja, which was, along with Hammarby, one of the properties that be bought when he was a well-off professor. This is the house to which he would retreat when he needed peace and quiet to think, leaving his wife and daughters among all the inquiring botanists swarming in the garden at Hammarby. When Linné died in 1778, neither his wife nor his daughters attended the stately funeral in Uppsala cathedral. Only his son came. He was born in 1741, during the last part of Linné’s dynamic period in Stockholm.

It happened in the 1700s that wives and daughters, at least in city environments, did not attend the funeral of the father of the house. Perhaps they did not wish to disturb things. Nevertheless, no one is likely to have hindered them from watching the world-famous man’s last journey. On the following day, as was the custom, they invited guests to dinner.