TalkHappy 300th Birthday, Carl Linneaus!
Linnaeus was the Swedish naturalist who gave the world modern taxonomy, the science of classifying organisms.
The New York Botanical Garden had a fete yesterday, to celebrate the man, his birthday, and his legacy.
Many fun tidbits about Linneus from James Barron in the NY Times:
“The biggest objection to Linnaeus’s sexual system of plant classification was that it was immodest,” Dr. Robbin C. Moran [a Linnaeus expert and the garden’s curator of ferns] said. “You couldn’t teach it to women and young people.”
Linnaeus also found a way to have the last word. “Linnaeus got even as only a taxonomist can,” Dr. Moran said. “He named smelly, ugly plants after his critics.”
So he named a weed Siegesbeckia, after Johann Siegesbeck, a German who called Linnaeus’s work “loathsome harlotry” and also said, “Who would have thought that bluebells, lilies and onions could be up to such immorality?”
And don’t even get me started on the banana, from ecological to socio-economical, it’s got a rare and fascinating history.
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