ABSTRACT
Springtime comes late in Sweden. So it was still springtime, on May 23, 1707, when a son was born to the wife of the curate of a small Swedish village called Stenbrohult. The season was raw, the ground was wet, the trees were in leaf but not yet flowering as the baby arrived, raw and wet himself. The child’s father, Nils Linnaeus, was an amateur botanist and avid gardener as well as a Lutheran priest, who had concocted his own surname (a bureaucratic necessity for university enrollment, replacing his traditional patronymic, son-of-Ingemar) from the Swedish word lind, meaning linden tree. Nils Linnaeus loved plants. The child’s mother, a rector’s daughter, was only eighteen. They christened the boy Carl and, as the story comes down, filtered through mythic retrospection flattering a man who became the world’s preeminent botanist, they decorated his cradle with flowers.
