A gardener friend of ours used to object to calling a plant by its Latin name. She heard it as pretense and obfuscation. But after the sage incident, she conceded that there was some point to it.

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'A NEW botanist is arisen in the North," the Sheridan Professor of Botany at Oxford announced in 1736, "founder of a new method, based on stamens and pistils, whose name is Linnaeus." That method was ...

Carl Linnaeus's use of erotic language to describe plants ultimately helped him to recruit a global network of specimen collectors. In August 1749, Pehr Kalm, a medical student from Finland, travelled ...

God, the Bible tells us, gave Adam the job of naming the animals. But it was Carl Linnaeus who figured out a good way to do it. Linnaeus, also known as Carolus Linnaeus or Carol von Linne, was the ...

For two years in the late 1970s I followed in the footsteps of Carl Linnaeus: I toiled in the field of taxonomy. The small corner of nature's jigsaw puzzle that I tackled was a group of marine sponges ...