ABSTRACT

Sundials were deemed trustworthy because they passively revealed natural diurnal patterns, and this chapter extends this idea further by examining the contemporaneous interest in flowers as the earth’s chronometers. This is a topic that has never been assessed at length in previous critical studies. In particular, this chapter probes various literary responses to Carl Linnaeus’s idea (first published in 1750) that certain flora could be so arranged that the opening of their flowers indicated the time systematically. This concept fascinated a wide range of authors during the second half of the long eighteenth century, and the writings of Erasmus Darwin, Lord Byron, Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, and William Whewell provide a central focus here. Accordingly, the notion of ecological horology is elaborated – that is, time-telling as mediated via the natural world.