Linnæus to his students:
“Whoever researches into the nature of insects finds that the so-called metamorphosis is not a transformation but only a shedding.
Artedi possessed the sharp gardening shears of logic. A tool which the gardener does not have in his collection. Linnæus makes a distinction between the realm of plants and the realm of animals. But he says there is a third one. It is the realm of stones. In his garden of plants and animals he now wants to have a ring of stone. And therefore tells the gardener to make plans for a stone fence.
The gardener replies that he knows the powers-thatbe have decreed that stone fences are to be erected.
Linnæus says that his stone fence is to be erected for the sake of the garden, not because of enclosure regulations.
The gardener does not reply. He looks down at the ground. Looks out at the fields.
Linnæus says that his stone fence is to lie, not round the garden, but in it.
The gardener asks if Linnæus has seen Bielke’s dike at Lövsta. The one that was erected in the autumn of the year before last. And which has already started to fall down.
Linnæus says that he has every confidence in his friend Bielke.
He says: “My highly-esteemed friend Sten Carl Bielke, Vice-President of His Majesty’s Royal Court of Appeal in Åbo, who together with myself founded the Academy of Sciences.”
He continues: “Baron Sten Carl Bielke, who along with myself introduced the Latin letter form into Swedish scientific writing.”
The gardener replies that, in any event, Bielke’s stone wall is in a lamentable state.
Linnæus says the gardener is entitled to that opinion and that, whatever the case may be, a stone fence can in all likelihood be erected passably well.
The gardener replies that a stone fence cannot be well erected at all, since when summer comes it will be destroyed by the sun, which will warm up the south side while the north side is covered in snow and ice, with the result that the stones on the south side will work loose and fall out.
Linnæus says this can be repaired.
The gardener replies that repairs of that kind are more labour-intensive and costly than building. That it would be better to erect a whole new stone fence every year at the end of the summer. That the whole countryside could devote itself to building stone fences all summer long.
Linnæus thinks that he could easily erect a stone fence in his garden himself, all on his own, if only a little one.
Earlier, there was another, smaller garden and a boy’s passionate interest in names and plants.
“What’s that called?” “What’s that called?”
Carl walked in that garden with his father.
“What’s that?” “What’s that?”
His father, pleased by the boy’s thirst for knowledge but tired of his forgetfulness, spoke harshly to him and issued a threat: that he would never again tell the boy the names of the plants if he forgot them after they had once been named.
“It isn’t strange,” Linnæus says to the gardener. “If I write ‘eye’, ‘birch’, ‘perch’ or ‘black grouse’, and the reader does not understand what is meant by these names, he will get no further with the text.”
“Knowledge,” says the gardener. “The brain,” he says, “gradually hardens.”
Linnæus is strolling and singing:
“Here comes Sir Karl. Ti-tum, ti-tum.”
The gardener points to a tree.
“A pine,” says Linnæus.
The gardener points to another tree.
“A spruce,” says Linnæus.
The gardener points to another tree, which resembles a pine and resembles a spruce. Linnæus tries to see if the tree is a pine or a spruce.
It’s an intermediate form. Linnæus is silent, unwilling to discuss this with a gardener. Such things are uncertain.
The gardener asks if the pine and the spruce haven’t interbred.
“Like a horse and a donkey make a mule.”
Linnæus is depressed. He has realised the magnitude of what was lost when Rudbeck’s collections were destroyed in the great fire.
He tells the gardener about this.
“My father and mother and my brothers and sisters died then,” the gardener says.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Linnæus says.
The gardener replies that he does not remember them, but that he sometimes wonders if they suffered much when they couldn’t save themselves.
The gardener says he can put something in Linnæus’s hand which he, Linnæus, will not be able to see, although everybody else in the whole world can see it. Linnæus cannot believe this. The gardener insists that he can. Linnæus denies it.
The gardener lifts Linnæus’s left hand to his left ear and closes his thumb and index finger round the earlobe. Then he asks: “Can you see your ear?”
Linnæus wants to reply: “Is it as simple as that?” But he says nothing.
The gardener: “Everyone else can see it, but you can’t see it.”
The disciple Rolander is in the garden. He asks the gardener if the grass snake is poisonous, if the greenfly bites, if the crow pecks people’s eyes out.
When the gardener replies, Rolander leans his head back, gazes intently upwards, and grips his nose with his fingers. The gardener falls silent.
They stand like this for a while. Then Rolander leans forward, blows coagulated blood out of his nostrils, and spits on the ground several times.
Thursday morning. There is a delivery of cheese and butter from Hallkved. Linnæus stands on top of the roof-ridge and greets the delivery with a shout. The servant and the coachman wave.
Now Linnæus sees before him all the commodities that pass him by and rejoices that he is spared them, these extravagant commodities.
He is spared sugar, confections, desserts, raisins, cinnamon, mace, almond tart, jelly, carp, oysters, caviar, any preserves, all sauces.
He is spared wines, brandy, tobacco, tea, coffee, chocolate, silks, satin, lace, drums, card-games, board-games, dice, comedies, concerts, masquerades.
He is spared offices, paintings, carriages, farmhands, maids, wax candles, fine palaces, great windows, plaster, porcelain.
“All that makes one weak! Weak!”
The gardener, with the butter and cheese in his arms, walks towards the food cellar.
It is a cloudy winter but not cold. From Slottsbacken one can see the stinking haze over the Uppsala plain.
It is the 17th of February, late evening. Linnæus and the gardener are out in the waterlogged meadows at Lövsta. Bright moonlight. The forest hard on the horizon.
The almanac shows a minor lunar eclipse at eleven o’clock at night.
The gardener cups his hands, as if to capture something. It is a game. Linnæus guesses.
“Mussels.”
Linnæus knows the gardener maintains that he has found the mollusc shells in the clay. Shells of molluscs from the salty Baltic, which stretched this far until the land rose.
Linnæus specifies.
“Mytilus edilis, the common sea mussel. Cardium edule, the cockle, with its ribbed shell. Tellina baltica, the little smooth one.”
“Feel,” says the gardener, lifting up a handful of soil to Linnæus, who takes it.
“Feel.”
Linnæus rubs the soil between his fingers, the black, smooth, clay soil glossy in the white light. He says nothing.
The gardener squints at him.
“There are bullheads and turbot out here.”
A little shadow passes over the edge of the moon.
“The peasants say we are out in the bay now.”
The shadow over the side of the moon slowly disappears. Linnæus thinks that soon they will be rowing home.
Linnæus lets Rolander depart for Surinam in America and orders from him two hundred cochineal beetles, fifty to be females, placed on their mother plant the prickly pear, for cultivation in the orangery and for use as a colouring medium. For the
improvement of the national finances.
He stands in front of the glass-panelled cabinet and looks at the things inside. He stands for a long time, looking fixedly at object after object. So as to remember them. But sometimes he spends too long on one thing and then it happens that he forgets one of the others. He gets stuck.
One must assume that he is happy in such moments, even if someone entering the room just then would see that he was not laughing.
Today, Löfling and Forsskål take their leave.
They explain solemnly that they intend to travel like the bee, collecting from many flowers, and not like the spider, which draws threads out of itself.
They walk down the slope to the ship and Linnæus sees them turn and wave.
It is the 28th of February, morning. Suddenly cold as ice. Linnæus, who has been afraid of the cold all his life, delays getting up. The coachman is waiting outside to drive him to Uppsala.
The coachman becomes impatient in the cold and knocks on the front door. Linnæus does not answer. The gardener comes to the coachman’s aid, opens the door and calls up the stairs to Linnæus.
No reply from up there. The gardener, clearly and in a loud voice:
“The coach from Böksta is here. The coachman is waiting.”
Linnæus finally calls downstairs:
“A good coachman likes waiting!”
The gardener, from the stairs:
“Good crayfish like being boiled alive.”
Linnæus:
“The peasant recognises plants, perhaps even cows and goats do too. But which of them has any knowledge of plants?”
Linnæus returns to his home in Småland and finds that his brothers and sisters are ill. They are all in bed. Candles have been brought to their bedsides but not lit. The room has been thoroughly cleaned.
Linnæus goes up to his siblings and feels their foreheads. It is fever.
Linnæus creeps in beside his siblings and lets vapour blend with vapour, warmth with warmth, so that his healthiness joins itself to their sickness.
The fever fades from his siblings’ foreheads and they get up, thoroughly rested, clear-eyed, healthy.
But the following night, the fever is there again. A more virulent fever than before and their eyes are cloudy, their bodies powerless.
Linnæus has a sheep slaughtered and flays it, laying his siblings inside the fleece to draw them back from death.
He waits. He holds the flat of his hand over their foreheads and faces. He wants to feel their breath becoming cool and dry. He wants to feel the fever leaving them.
Wind. The gardener and Linnæus are standing in the grove beside the oak, the elm and the ash, listening to the jingle of the Æolian bells.
“Glass”, says the gardener, “as a material is fluid in its natural state. At our temperature it takes on a more solid form. But it is still fluid. Only frozen. But still moving the whole time, just a little, inside itself.”
Linnæus replies: “Then glass is related to the mussels in the seas. After all, they are nothing but a fine moisture which has acquired a shell.”
While giving a lecture at Uppsala he holds a long, narrow strip of paper between his fingers, folded several times so that in the end it is tiny. For each section of his address he unfolds a part of the strip.
He keeps his thumb on the final part throughout. When he gets there he lifts his thumb and starts on the final section. This happens now.
He is talking about barley-toads. He says that their call is heard when it is time for the peasants to sow their barley. He describes how, in Skåne, the barley toads screeched towards evening as if great bells were ringing three miles away, although they were nearby in the ponds.
This, he says, is precisely what struck him as strange. That the creature’s call, when it is nearby, can be heard far away.
The students stand silently, pondering. Billberg, Åkerhielm, Dubb, Rehn, Beckstadius, Bungencrona, Ekbom, Sandberg.
When they speak, they are from Skuttunge, Västerlösa, Levene, Norrby. He sees them slowly leaving him and returning to their parents and their farms.
Back at Hammarby again, Linnæus mentions the passage about the barley toads to the gardener. The latter replies:
“If you put a bucket over your head in the summertime and submerge yourself in a lake shouting loudly into the bucket it can be heard a long way away.”
All that evening Linnæus revels in the gardener’s observation. He thinks that it must necessitate an extra section and an extension of the long, narrow strip of paper for his next lecture.
But how it came about, this knowledge of the gardener’s, he doesn’t inquire.
Morning. The post-boy comes with a letter from Rolander to Linnæus.
“Gardener! He writes about crocodiles. He writes that anyone who is used to them can bestride one of them, put a bridle on it and ride it like a horse.”
Linnæus shows the letter to the gardener. In the bottom corner there is an ink drawing of a crocodile half-submerged in a river.
The gardener:
“The artist has kept a considerable distance between himself and his subject.”
Linnæus to his students, who are gathered round his table:
“When the hunt is on for a fellow who has run away and someone tells me that he is definitely in Sweden, then I know that he should be searched for in this country and not in some other one. If someone else comes to me and says that he is definitely in Småland, then I know in which province in the country I should look for him. If yet another person comes and assures me that he is in Skallelöv parish, then I know that he should be sought in that parish and not elsewhere. Finally, someone comes and says he is in this or that farmyard: then I have found what I was seeking.
In the centre of the table are an egg and a bowl of water. The egg sways to and fro in the direction of the bowl. Linnæus makes to go and investigate, but the gardener takes him by the arm.
“Wait.”
The egg sways.
“Anders showed me. You blow out the contents. Put a common leech inside. Seal it with white wax. Put a bowl of water alongside.”
Linnæus stands, hesitantly. Disapproving.
“Who is this Anders?”
“Anders. He is just a child.”
Now and then large packages arrive for Linnæus.
The post-boy hands over parcels allegedly containing strange plants, which however are only clumsy hoaxes. Linnæus is on his guard. He knows the story of the wonderful stone from Würzburg with the incised fossilised frog so incredibly beautifully outlined in it, a stone which the famous professor Beringer described in eloquent essays which later, out of wrath, shame and contrition, he had burned when it emerged that his own students had, for a joke, put together a lying stone.
Sometimes, too, visitors turn up, although they tend to be genuinely odd. The gardener has the task of turning them away. He talks with them then. Sometimes for far too long and insufficiently dismissively, in Linnæus’s opinion. On occasions he suspects that it is actually the gardener who has enticed them to the garden. This constant procession of charlatans, perfumers, vagrants, snake-oil salesmen, vagabonds, wizards, wise men and wise women traipsing along the highway and over the fields towards Hammarby.
Linnæus can see them clearly from his window. But at night he does not see clearly. He thinks they are standing with their faces pressed up against the panes, looking in. Like the bogeymen that mother and father used to scare him with, so that he wouldn’t go out at night.
Thursday morning in April. Cheese and butter. But the servant looks pale and falls to the ground from the driver’s seat, hurting himself badly.
“Certain diseases,” says Linnæus, “are caused by slack fibres, others by tight ones.”
The servant whimpers.
“The tight fibres can be made more pliable by a greasy preparation. The slack fibres can be pulled together by an astringent preparation and strengthened by a bitter one.”
The coachman and
the gardener carry the servant in.
“There are also diseases which proceed from bodily fluids and which depend on their nature or mixture. A sour nature can be cancelled out by a dry preparation and fixed by a bitter one.”
The servant lies completely motionless, staring vacantly.
“Our body,” Linnæus continues, “also contains the less well researched locomotive element in the bone-marrow and the brain, which sends out sensitive nerves to all parts of the body. When this element has been damaged, it depends in the first instance on the diet, which consists of breathing, ingested nourishment, movement, sleep, secretions and mental activity.”
The servant suddenly vomits, then loses consciousness completely. The coachman and the gardener are greatly perturbed.
By the afternoon the servant has recovered and he drives with the coachman to Lövsta.
Linnæus is in the garden equipped with magnifyingglass, botanical pins, botanical knife, lead pencil, vasculum, unbound papers and a box of pins for mounting insects. Attire: a baggy shirt and wide trousers in sailor’s style.
The gardener is curious about the book that Linnæus is wandering about with. It is The Gardener’s Dictionary by Philip Miller, gardener and first botanist in the Chelsea Physic Garden. The book is a small, handy octavo volume designed to be carried in a garden while one works.
The gardener wants to look inside the book and tries to get close to Linnæus. But Linnæus moves off along the path, facing away from him, and calls out in a loud voice:
“This is not about kitchen herbs and decorative plants. It is not a book for ordinary gardeners. It is a book for botanists.”
Linnæus told Artedi about the apothecary Seba in Amsterdam. About his uniquely comprehensive and universally admired museum of wonders and about his blind faith in the famous and singular sevenheaded hydra, taken from Prague by Königsmarck and now in the possession of the mayor of Hamburg.
“Actually,” said Linnæus, “an artificial body, probably with a frame of narrow wooden ribs and filled with linen rags, which had been covered with snakeskin and provided with seven heads taken from weasels, as can easily be seen from the hydra’s teeth.”
Linnæus was amusing about his membership, under the name Dioscorides II, of Seba the apothecary’s natural history society Academia Leopoldino-Carolina Naturæ Curiosorum.
The Garden Page 2
