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Linnaeus: The Name Giver
JUNE 2007
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Linnaeus: The Name Giver
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By David Quammen
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Photographs by Helene Schmitz
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His wife sternly guarded their privacy, and his son became only a middling botanist, but his teaching role delivered rich satisfactions, and he had an abundance of brilliant intellectual offspring. Despite the limitations of his language skills (he may have known some Dutch and German but did all his writing in Swedish and Latin) and of his geographical experience (he never left Sweden again), he became a global encyclopedist of flora and fauna; in lieu of personal travel, he relied on written correspondence with naturalists all over the world and on information received from the apostles, such as Daniel Solander (who sailed on Cook's first voyage), Pehr Kalm (in North America), and Anders Sparrman (China, South Africa, then Cook's second voyage). Linnaeus himself had no appetite for the rigors and climate of the tropics, though he was voraciously curious about tropical plant diversity. Let the young men gather the information; he would systematize it.
In Uppsala, I discussed this manipulative, homebody aspect with Professor Carl-Olof Jacobson, a retired zoologist who serves as chairman of the Swedish Linnaeus Society. No, Linnaeus didn't want to travel abroad, Professor Jacobson told me. "What he wanted to be was a spider in the net."
The center of that net, that vast web of scientific silk, was in and around Uppsala—including the university, its splendid botanical garden, and a small farm known as Hammarby, about five miles (eight kilometers) outside the city. Linnaeus bought Hammarby and built a large, simple house there to be his summer retreat. It might have served also as his retirement home, though he never retired. Each autumn, having savored his time in this getaway, he moved back into town, where the living was less austere. He grew feeble and ill, then suffered a seizure after one last escape to the countryside, strictly against doctor's orders, and died on January 10, 1778. They buried him beneath the stone floor of Uppsala's cathedral, the Westminster Abbey of Sweden.
Six years later, following Linnaeus's posthumous instructions, his widow sold his library, his manuscripts, and most of his collections to a buyer who would care for them well. That buyer, a young Englishman named James Edward Smith, founded a scientific society to receive the treasures and called it the Linnean Society of London (its spelling derived not from his original name but from the noble version, von Linné), where they lie protected in a basement vault but available in physical (and, soon, digitized) form to scholars. Linnaeus himself would approve; knowledge, he believed, is meant to be communicated and used.
Linnaeus's country home, Hammarby, remained in the family for a century and then was bought by the Swedish state to be made a museum. Although his house near the university in Uppsala has also been saved, and lately restored, Hammarby conveys a more vivid sense of his character, his foibles, his loneliest joys. Inside the old farmhouse, overlooking muddy crop fields, his collection of walking sticks is on display. So is the red skullcap he often wore over his short-cropped hair, in lieu of a formal wig. There are portraits of his four daughters, his son, and his pet monkey, in no particular order of fondness. His wife and he kept separate bedrooms at opposite ends of the second floor. His is tucked away, accessible only through another room that functioned as his study.
The bedroom, preserved much as he left it, contains a small curtained bed of the sort known in Sweden as a himmelssäng, a bed of heaven. Against the west wall is a wooden desk and, above it, a window. The walls are covered with flowers.
That is, they are wallpapered wildly from floor to ceiling with large floral images cut from books. The plants are robust, exuberant, some of them garish, some elegant, all suggesting fecundity and fruition: pineapple, banana, magnolia, lily, cactus, papaya, frangipani, and others. Many of these hand-colored engravings came from paintings by his old friend Georg Dionysius Ehret. Rare and magnificent, they would be collectibles in their own right, even absent the association with Linnaeus. But, once bright and crisp, they are now faded, smeary, streaked with the punishments of moisture and time. On the day I visited, accompanied by a botanical curator named Karin Martinsson, still another damp January chill hung in the air.
Linnaeus was warned that such damage would occur, but evidently he didn't care. He wanted the pictures around him. Never mind if they decayed. So what? His own body was doing that too.
Even now these antique prints could be peeled carefully off, Martinsson told me, and preserved under better conditions. But that's not going to happen. "Taking them down from the walls," she said, "would be like ripping the heart out of Hammarby." Left as is, the heart of the house reflects the heart of its original owner: full of plants. The pilgrims who visit this room during the tercentenary year—presumably there will be many, from around the world—can look at that improvised wallpaper and sense an important truth about the lifework of Carl Linnaeus.
It wasn't just about knowledge. It was about knowledge and love.
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