The Linnaeus Expert

By Abbott, Jez

DR CHARLIE JARVIS, HEAD, LINNAEAN PLANT NAME TYPIFICATION PROJECT, NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM Botanist Dr Charlie Jarvis hides his talents behind his bushels, and thank goodness he does. One other in this profession who famously didn’t is Carl Linnaeus. And 300 years after the man was born, his arrogance remains undimmished and staggering.

In fairness, Linnaeus had plenty to shout about, being the legendary father figure of taxonomy, who devised the system we use today to classify plants. “God created; Linnaeus set in order,” said the Swede on his pioneering binominal naming.

And though Jarvis would never use such lofty terms for his magnum opus, which took around 25 years to complete, his tome of 1,025 pages is set to become a landmark and seminal publication, if not legendary. In Order out of Chaos, the two men meet.

“Linnaeus’ main importance is that his names are still in use today,” says Jarvis, head of the Linnaean plant name typification project at the Natural History Museum. “He described over 9,100 names, which underpin the concept of the naming of plants.”

Those 9,100-plus names emerge again in Jarvis’ book. The lavish hardback includes watercolours, engravings and a painstaking catalogue of names, explanatory notes and specimen types from Abrus precatorius to Zygophyllum spinosum.

In many ways the man who gave us binominal (two-name) nomenclature (naming) in his A-to-Z book Species Plantarum of 1753 was ahead of his time, reckons Jarvis. The latter’s book has been called the “most detailed account” of Linnaeus and his scientific names to date. He therefore knows the genus of his man’s genius.

The 18th-century physician lived at a time when exploration and trade were homing devices for scientists bringing new specimens into Europe. These were scrutinised as potential crops in the way today’s scientists look with growing desperation at alternative crops to feed mass populations.

Linnaeus, for example, imported sugar maple from South America to reduce Sweden’s reliance on buying cane from overseas. His system of naming proved both enduring and flexible, withstanding an expanding knowledge-base of biology and evolution.

“Linnaeus sought to reveal what he saw as the divine order of the natural world so it might be exploited for human benefit,” says Jarvis. “He was not modest and felt God, the ‘creator’, had given him the task of cataloguing and giving order to plants.

“He was also highly innovative, introducing a sexual system of classifying plants into groups based on the arrangement of stamens and ovules. This was seen as shocking to polite society, which insisted botany and horticulture had nothing to do with sex.”

Linnaeus adored the bad publicity. And such vaunting of self- worth is not entirely overhyped for a man whose face now dons Swedish banknotes and whose name appears in every plant book you’ve ever thumbed – check out the letter L next to plant names.

His garden in Hammarby, outside the university town of Uppsala, is a place of pilgrimage, and one disciple paid tribute at last month’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Ulf Nordfjell’s garden boasted plants cultivated by Linnaeus such as Asarum europaeum.

Such a flurry of interest in his quarry and the timeliness of publishing a book on the tercentenary of Linnaeus’ birth, should win over plant lovers otherwise reluctant to cough up Pounds 80 for the book, hopes his chronicler.

Since the project’s start in the early 1980s, Jarvis’ team of botanists have brought order to chaos by corralling names, specimens and illustrations to locate, identify and designate all of the plants listed by Linnaeus. This took time and patience.

Jarvis, who joined the Natural History Museum 26 years ago, has been amassing data for the book since that time. The project is a joint initiative by the museum and the Linnean Society of London, which bills itself the “world’s oldest active biological society” and was formed in 1788.

Before binominal nomenclature, horticulturists and botanists struggled with such unwieldy tongue twisters as Solarium caule inermi herbaceo, foliis pinnatis integerrimis, also known as the common potato.

From the mid 18th century it was good old Solarium tuberosum thanks to the Swede’s groundbreaking book. Jar-vis’ 21st-century revisit has won plaudits for blending a scholar’s knowledge with a journalistic lightness of touch.

Such praise in another age may have pleased Linnaeus, a man with such unswerving belief his work was “a masterpiece that no one can read too often or admire too much”. Similar praise for Order out of Chaos would possibly please Jarvis as well.

Jez Abbott

CV

1972-1977 Botany degree followed by a master’s postgraduate qualification in plant taxonomy from University of Reading

1977-1980 Doctorate thesis on the genus Tolpis

1980-1981 Works in the conservation unit at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

1981-date Heads the Linnaean plant name typification project at the Natural History Museum and in 1990 is awarded the Linnaean Society of London’s bicentenary medal for botany

Copyright Haymarket Business Publications Ltd. Jun 21, 2007

(c) 2007 Horticulture Week. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.