In 1738, the young Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus dared to explore how the birds and the bees carry myriads of pollen grains (male) from the stamens of many flowers to the pistil (female) of another flower, thus propagating new generations. It’s the birds and the bees, a concept that sensible parents even today review with their adolescent children.
Sex! The rawest form of it, so wrote Linnaeus’s rival, Johann Siegesbeck, a Russian professor who labeled the botanist’s account as “loathsome harlotry,” extraneous to the Holy Bible. Jason Roberts tells this tale in his lively new book, “Every Living Thing — the Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life.” Fulminating against the young scientist, the Russian just couldn’t stop:
“To describe a vegetable kingdom as naturally welcoming eight, ten, twelve, twenty or more husbands in the same bed with one woman, was to warp the sensibilities of young students, who might be corrupted by the immorality that had broken out among the lilies and onions.”
Warp the sensibilities of students? Doesn’t that sound familiar? Now 286 years after Siegesbeck, Republicans in 26 states now “protect young students” by banning books.
Pardon, me. I had started out to review that lovely book on the “Race to Know All Life” until it sidetracked me into politics. Now I’m back.
Let me note first that Linnaeus’ major scientific contribution was the binomial (two names) system whereby each class of plants and animals is awarded a genus name followed by a species, both in Latin. Sixty years ago my wife and I bought the Shawnee house lot where I now live, a site rich in life, from Quercus macrocarpa for huge burr oaks in the backyard, to Plodia interpunctella, for the teensy Indian meal moths that so enjoy my kitchen, likely yours, too.
Plus a half-dozen other oak species, hickories, wild black cherry, two huge sycamores, a white pine, our native dry-land dogwood Cornus racemosa , as opposed to the large-flowered Cornus Florida , plus native evergreen Juniperus virginiana with dusty-looking blue berries that nicely flavor gin.
We have birds beyond belief, my favorite being the barred owl, Strix varia . We have the rarely seen but often heard coyote, Canis lupus , plus red fox Vulpes vulpes and bobcat, Lynx rufus , which I’ve seen here only once, bolting 30 miles an hour across the road ahead of my car. Don’t forget me, Homo sapien (wise human) as an occupant of this ground. During many years of walking the woods, I have proudly spouted these Latin identities to friends, on this score, not one as wise as me.
As a scientist, Charles Darwin enjoyed an orderly life. For nearly five years, he went on a round-the-world voyage that launched him as the greatest truth teller of his epoch. By contrast, a century earlier, poor Linnaeus struggled like fish on a hook, bouncing from job to job. But he was among the first who decided humans were animals like other earth life forms, subdividing us into four different “varieties” based on skin color and geographic origin: “white” Europeans, “red” Americans, “tawny” Asians and “Black” Africans. On this score, he was, in 1738, just as racist as I was growing up 80 years ago in a viciously racist Tulsa, Oklahoma.
But by grouping living things into hierarchies and giving them names, Linnaeus created an order that allows us to study the seemingly chaotic world of nature. He identified about 12,000 species, believing this was just about the world’s total. Today scientists estimate that, counting bacteria and viruses, there may be 10 million species, or 20 times that many, of which only 1.9 million have even been named.
Among species I despise, none surpasses the Amur honeysuckle, Lonicera maackii , a sometimes 20-foot monster shrub imported from east Asia that now dominates trail sides in Greater Kansas City. It greens up in spring before native shrubs and holds leaves far into fall, shading out everything else. It is viciously invasive, comparable to the Russians in Ukraine, though more successful in dominating ground.
I contrast that trash with another flower often denounced by dunces as “invasive.” It is purple loosestrife, Lythrum salicaria , a beautiful perennial throwing up pink flowering spikes through a long period of summer. It likes the waterside but will thrive nearly anywhere, from my own shady yard to the blazing sunlit parking lot of Christ Church Anglican on Nall Avenue. Invasive? Not in Kansas and Missouri. I never see enough of it.
As to that Russian critic who said Linnaeus’ reports on the love life of plants would warp the sensibilities of young students, the scientist himself came back with a quick riposte. He plastered the name Siegesbeckia on a small, foul-smelling weed.
Contact the columnist at hammerc12@gmail.com .
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