Here’s a thread which I hope will turn out to be about H.G. Wells, John Logie Baird, Florence Nightingale, Cecil B De Mille, Alexander Graham Bell, Karl and Groucho Marx, Mary Shelley, Bill Shakespeare, Hildegard von Bingen, George Orwell and other visionaries, artists and inventors.
But first a country ramble.
One of the great pleasures of country life here on the island of Öland are all the splendid, rather ancient, stone walls and the magnificent hedgerows. Many different wild flowers flourish there and blackberries and sloan berries waiting to be picked.
Anyway, I was driving home along our “street” here on Saturday evening (lane perhaps is a better description) and one tall, elegant, crimson plant really caught my eye. I took a photo and posted it on Facebook. Lazy sod that I am, I hadn’t made any attempt to identify it other than asking my family who hadn’t a Scooby.
Luckily, I have FB friends who are diligent horticulturists and without prompting several of them made suggestions about what it was.
Carol from Cobham was first. “Purple Loosestrife? Tends to grow in damp hedgerows & boggy ground. Lovely but quite invasive. We see it a lot on the banks of the river Mole around here.”
Such a wonderful name. I thought she’d made it up. If this plant was a woman, she’d be rather ostentatious, gregarious, hilarious, voluptuous and hedonistic: a hedgerow hellraiser!
Next up was none other than our own @Hubert Rawlinson.
“Rosebay Willow Herb aka Fireweed. I used to have it a lot on the allotment, called fireweed as it grew on railway embankments especially after they’d caught fire from steam engines. Also grew on bombsites.”
A quick Google revealed this to be the correct answer.
This was confirmed by a Swedish friend in Dalsland who told me that there are two names in Swedish:
Mjölkört – ”milk herb” so called because cows eating it was believed to boost milk production
Rallar-ros ”railway builders’ rose”. The “rallarna” were the guys who built the Swedish railway system and fireweed flourished by the side of the new railway tracks. Just as Hubert mentions!
That Facebook discussion made me think of a chap who was a pan-European, Swedish superstar, centuries before ABBA: the biologist and physician, Carl Linnaeus (23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778). The scientist who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms.
I can’t help thinking that he’d be rather chuffed that modern technology was aiding horticultural conversations in 2024.
Which got me thinking about how all the great and the good mentioned above would react the preservation of their legacy. I’d like to hear your thoughts on that topic.
But first a little more about that fabulous brainbox from Uppsala.
In the summer of 1741, Linnaeus, 25 years old, along with six assistants, set off on a research journey to the Baltic islands of Öland and Gotland on behalf of the Swedish government.
Our usual route to Öland, the E22 highway and the bridge from Kalmar were far in the future so he would have travelled by boat. He wrote a book about his travels which became an international best-seller and contributed greatly to his reputation.
My curiosity about his journey led me to the Uppsala University website which has some excellent material about their world-famous prodigy.
Here’s a description of the great man as he sets off on an expedition.
“With him on his horse’s back he had a leather bag
that he had carefully packed with one shirt, two short
sleeved jackets, two nightshirts, a woollen cap, a comb,
inkhorn, penholder, magnifying glass, telescope, gauze
hood against the mosquitoes, scientific books, a diary
to keep notes on the journey in and sheets of paper to
place the plants he collected in. Between his thigh and
the saddle he had placed a small pistol. He was dressed
in a wig, coat, leather trousers and riding boots. In his
pocket he had his wallet with his travel passes and a let
ter of recommendation. He also took with him a small
rapier and an octagonal stick, a kind of almanac, which
would help him to keep track of the days. That was his
baggage for the five-month-long journey. It was at times
to be a dangerous adventure for the 25-year-old
Linnaeus.”
Biologists among you will know that, after his death, Linnaeus’s library and collection were purchased by an Englishman, James Edward Smith, who founded the Linnean Society in London in 1788.
It does seem a great shame that Linnaeus died before the advent of the gramophone record.
Can you imagine how beautifully organised his record collection would be?
The Stone Roses, the New Fast Automatic Daffodils, Daisy Jones and the Six, the Triffids …. all in the right place!
Here’s my photo of fireweed.
Linnaeus would have referred to it as Chamaenerion angustifoilium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamaenerion_angustifolium
And here is a hedgerow on our street.
Remember don’t be alarmed if there’s a Bussell in your hedgerow.
He’d be grumpy about my second capital V.
He would indeed, @Vulpes Vulpes.
I get the sense that he could be rather pernickety. I remember reading about his visit to London in 1736. The Englishmen he met were not over-impressed by this pushy, rather arrogant young Swede.
https://charlessaumarezsmith.com/2014/09/17/linnaeus-in-london/
“he came to London in July 1736 to visit Sir Hans Sloane, the founder of the British Museum, and Philip Miller, who was chief gardener of the Chelsea Physic Garden. Apparently neither of them was impressed by Linneaus’s new system of classification, since it was too obviously sexual. They preferred the taxonomy of John Ray. Thomas Knowlton, who was Lord Burlington’s gardener at Londesborough, thought the Linnaean system ‘altogether whimsicall and ridiculous’. But I could find no confirmation of the suggestion that Linnaeus called a particularly prickly plant after Miller in revenge.”
Here’s an excellent description of his travels during this period:
https://herbariumworld.wordpress.com/2019/04/29/linnaeus-beyond-the-netherlands/
“Not surprisingly, Linnaeus first visited Hans Sloane, then an aged icon among collectors, who opened his herbarium to the Swede. Jan Frederik Gronovius had already sent Sloane a copy of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, and Herman Boerhaave wrote a letter of introduction in which he put Linnaeus on a par with Sloane, describing them as “a pair of men whose equal is hardly to be found in all the world” (quoted in Blunt, 1971, p. 110). Sloane didn’t quite see things that way and didn’t pay that much attention to Linnaeus who later described Sloane’s herbarium as disorganized. His first meeting with Philip Miller, the head of the Chelsea Physic Garden, was also less than a success, but eventually Miller gave Linnaeus a good selection of plants to take back to Clifford, as well as herbarium specimens that William Houston had collected in Central America.”
Here’s an amusing article about “Vengeful Taxonomy”
https://gizmodo.com/these-scientific-names-were-chosen-purely-to-insult-cer-1691360201
Linnaeus had no qualms about insulting his enemies when he named a new species.
So much for the pure, impartial spirit of science!
https://entomologytoday.org/2014/03/20/vengeful-taxonomy-your-chance-to-name-a-new-species-of-cockroach/
A friend just send me a link to this BBC In Our Time radio podcast.
“Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, ideas and legacy of the pioneering Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778). The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote: “Tell him I know no greater man on earth”.
The son of a parson, Linnaeus grew up in an impoverished part of Sweden but managed to gain a place at university. He went on to transform biology by making two major innovations. He devised a simpler method of naming species and he developed a new system for classifying plants and animals, a system that became known as the Linnaean hierarchy. He was also one of the first people to grow a banana in Europe.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001l291?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
Linnaeus wrote many of his books in Latin, as did many scientists of his time.
Here’s an excellent description of him from the San Diego Natural History Museum.
https://www.sdnhm.org/blog/blog_details/carl-linnaeus-the-man-who-classified-us-homo-sapiens/121/#:~:text=When%20Linnaeus%20was%20first%20naming,he%20learned%20to%20speak%20Swedish.
“When he was only 28, Linnaeus wrote Systema Naturae or the System of Nature, a
fundamental work of biology which introduced and used his binomial nomenclature throughout the book. In one section, he focused on the importance of the sexual parts of plants when classifying them. In describing male and female parts of flowering plants, he referred to “two brides in bed with one husband” to explain the presence of two pistils and one stamen. One of his critics took violent offense and called Linnaeus’ focus on the sex organs “loathsome harlotry,” believing that God would never have permitted such licentious behavior in plants! But Linnaeus got the last laugh; he named a very small weed after him. Sigesbeckia orientalis, or common St. Paul’s wort, in case you were wondering.”
Time to mention the wonderful Swedish instrumental trio: Väsen.
Mikael Marin (5-string viola), Olov Johansson (Nyckelharpa), Roger Tallroth (12-string guitar).
Their Tiny Desk session is a great introduction. Bob Boilen describes them:
“They span the wide emotional range of Swedish folk music, equally haunting and celebratory. There are some similarities to Irish jigs, reels and waltzes that I’m more familiar with, but this music is more ear-bending, with more surprises than I’m used to in traditional string band folk music.”
Hang on! This is a thread about obscure hedgerow flowers. What’s the connection between them and this fab combo?
2007 was a year of global celebrations of the tercentenary of Linnaeus’s birth in 1707, Väsen got called to produce an Lp of Linnean music.
“Väsen was commissioned to arrange music to mark this occassion, so the core trio asked their longtime collaborator and percussionist André Ferrari to help them once again. Virtually all of the source material they used is traditional music from the period and region of Linnaeus’s life, including pieces writted by his brother-in-law and by a cousin, and pieces newly rediscovererd on Linneaus’s own restored “barrel organ.” But the music is arranged and performed in the uniquely Väsen way, maintaining true roots to the tradition, while at the same time being emphatically modern.”
The album is on Spotify
and YouTube
Here’s one of the pieces played live.
And here they are complete with some dancers.
Is this how the great botanist would have looked when he was cutting a rug?
There was a rumour that Sweden’s Mr Flower Power was totally disinterested in music. This theory has now been disproved.largely due to the content of the Linnaeus family barrel organ which had some cracking dance tunes on it. This radio interview features a photo.
https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/1388547#:~:text=L%C3%A4nge%20gick%20ryktet%20om%20Carl,eget%20vevpositiv%20fr%C3%A5n%201750%2Dtalet.
Ooops! that content was comprehensible only to @Diddley Farquar, @DuCo01 and @Locust. My apologies to the rest of you.
“Diddley, DuCool and Locust” Now there’s a great band name!
I’d buy their LPs!
What does an ancient barrel organ sound like?
If you have a specialist interest in websites with intimate portraits of ancient Swedish organs. I can give you some handy tips!