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Press Kit:

Linnaeus in the Garden

April 28 – July 29, 2007

Botanical Center

The 300th birthday of Swedish botanist Carl Linneaus will be marked with an exhibition of rare books drawn from The Huntington’s history of science holdings and from the Torbjorn Lindell Collection. Linnaeus is credited with creating order out of chaos -- the chaos of naming and identifying plants. Before Linnaeus, no system existed for giving workable, reliable names to plants, and thus no global capability for scientists and others to communicate about them.  Linnaeus created the mechanism to do so: a universal system for organizing plants by their male and female reproductive characteristics. He devised the concept of a two-part formal name, the genus and species, which is still used to give scientific names to all plants and animals today. Magnolia grandiflora L., for example, is the scientific name he gave to the southern magnolia.  Most sensationally, Linnaeus brought plant sexuality to the forefront---it was an aspect of plants that had only been discovered a few years before his birth. Among the exhibit’s highlights will be the first edition of Species plantarum, which is the foundation for modern plant nomenclature, and the 1740 edition of Systema naturae, which set the standard for the two-part scientific names, the genus and species.

The exhibition is being presented in conjunction with the Swedish Consulate of Los Angeles.

 

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