The Secret Museum. Molly Oldfield

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СКАЧАТЬ Lapps slept, ate, dried fish and even the kinds of games they played (throwing balls and a game that looks like chess). There is a beautiful sketch of a crane fly, and an interesting one of Andromeda being threatened by a sea monster beside one of an Andromeda plant being threatened by a newt. I really liked his drawing of an owlet and one of a Sami baby wrapped up cosily.

      He tells how to cure chilblains with roasted reindeer cheese, how to fix a broken pot by boiling it in milk and how to make thread from reindeer hooves. He described the singing in Lapland: ‘No Laplander can sing, but instead of singing utters a noise resembling the barking of dogs.’

      The journal was published as Iter Laponicum but it was brilliant to see the real thing, written in Lapland. Linnaeus brought it back to his home in Uppsala, along with a drum and a Lapp costume. There is a painting of him wearing it holding the drum and his Linnaea borealis plant, in the library upstairs at the Linnean Society.

      I’d been told that Linnaeus was the first person to grow a banana in Europe, so I asked Lynda whether there was anything banana related in the collection. She opened up a book called Musa Cliffortiana Florens Hartecampi, all about that first banana. It was grown in the garden of Linnaeus’s friend George Clifford, in Holland. Musa is the genus for banana; it was named from musz, which is the Arabic word for ‘banana’; or perhaps for the nine Greek muses themselves. Inside the book is a fold-out drawing of the fruiting banana plant. It ends with a question: ‘Will my banana grow for years?’

      Lynda then showed me Linnaeus’s most famous work, Systema Naturae. Published in 1735, it’s a history of all the living things he knew about at the time, divided up according to his sexual system for classifying them. He caused a bit of a scandal at the time by suggesting plants had a sex life. There are so many names he adopted which we still use today; magnolia, clematis, digitalis, jasmine, fuchsia, salvia.

      Animals are included in the Systema, written down in a table, according to the genus Linnaeus assigned to them. If there was an animal he wasn’t sure about, he put it in ‘Worms’. He put humans in the same box as apes, which he didn’t want to do, but he couldn’t see a way around it. Anything he wasn’t sure actually existed he put in a box called ‘Paradoxa’, which contains the satyr, phoenix, dragon, unicorn and pelican. He wasn’t sure he believed in pelicans, because they were supposed to feed their young on their own blood. He also named stones, fossils and minerals. This first edition copy was huge, the only one that was published in such a big format. Linnaeus used to fold it into four and carry it around with him.

      There are two bookcases filled with copies of Linnaeus’s work. He had many of his own publications bound with blank pages between printed ones so that he could make his own notes as he reread his books and update them as he found new species. His handwritten ideas are all over the blank pages, mostly in Latin. This room is the only place in the world where there are so many copies of Linnaeus’s books covered in his own annotations.

      The day I visited the collection, thousands of Homo sapiens were rushing straight past the doors of the Linnean Society to see the David Hockney exhibition. I saw it too. Just think of all those flowers Hockney painted all over Yorkshire, some buried under snow, others popping up into the sunlight after the winter underground, each one with a scientific name, many of them coined by Linnaeus.

      The entire collection has recently been digitized and is up on the Linnaean Society’s website. Researchers around the world look things up regularly, leaving the centuries old collections undisturbed in their wood-panelled room. There is a postcard of Linnaeus in there, propped up against the books, watching over the lot.

      [The world of Linnaeus] I went to see thousands of specimens and books that belonged to Linnaeus. They were brought from his home in Sweden to London, and were used to found the Linnean Society.

      [Linnaea borealis] Linnaeus’s signature flower, the twinflower or Linnaea borealis, named in his honour.

      [Linnaeus’s pearls] Linnaeus was the first person to culture artificial pearls in a mollusc. Some of his pearls turned out better than others.

      [Andromeda] Linnaeus drew this sketch inside the journal that he wrote while in Lapland.

      [Systema Naturae] The first edition of Systema Naturae had only 11 pages but Linnaeus added to the book over the years, adding new species as he discovered them. The 13th edition appeared in 1770 and was 3,000 pages long. ‘God created – Linnaeus organized.’ That was how Linnaeus summed up his lifetime achievements.

      THEY ARE SEEDS, INSIDE KEW’S Millennium Seed Bank (MSB). This particular seed is Lamourouxia viscosa from Mexico and is one of millions stored there. It has a lovely honeycomb cage, so that it can float in the air and spread the range of its plant. I like the design of this seed but, really, I could have chosen any of the seeds preserved in the vaults of Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank, because each is unique and precious.

      Seeds first appeared on Earth some 360 million years ago, and since then they have spread across all environments. They are amazingly diverse, come in all kinds of shapes and range in size from the largest seed in the world, the coco de mer palm (Lodoicea maldivica) from the Seychelles, which looks like a big, curvaceous bottom (Linnaeus called it Lodoicea callipyge, callipyge meaning ‘lovely-bummed’) to orchid seeds the size of a speck of dust.

      Some seeds can remain alive in the ground for hundreds of years if need be, until the conditions are just right for them to germinate. A date palm seed estimated to be 2,000 years old was discovered in 1963 when Herod the Great’s fortress of Masada near the Dead Sea was excavated. It was planted in 2005, and now Methuselah, as the plant is called, stands over a metre high. The amazing ability that seeds have to pause in time was the inspiration behind the Millenium Seed Bank Partnership.

      Wolfgang Stuppy, seed morphologist at the seed bank, showed me around. He explained that one in five species of plant on Earth is faced with extinction. In 2000, Kew began collecting seeds as life insurance for the future. They started by collecting thousands of seeds from every species of wild British flowering plant and freezing them so that, in the future, if any become extinct, we will have their seeds, here in Sussex. It will be possible to defrost them, grow them and reintroduce them to the countryside. There are about 1,400 native seed-bearing plants in the UK, and 90 per cent of them are protected here, carefully frozen for the future. Britain was the first country in the world to do this with their seeds.

      The seed bank has a nursery in which it grows flowers that once adorned British meadows countrywide, such as the cuckoo flower, green field speedwell and the harebell. Slowly, the people who work there are trying to get Britain to remember its native wild beauty. Some plants that were once extinct, such as a starry aquatic herb, called starfruit, have already been reintroduced into the countryside.

      The seed bank has also begun to stretch its green fingers СКАЧАТЬ