Carl Linnaeus was the godfather of pedantry. Born 300 years ago to a Swedish, plant-loving clergyman, the young boy eschewed the priesthood for medicine, specialising in the treatment of syphilis. Botany, and the derivation of medicines from plants, was then central to the training of all physicians; for Linnaeus, however, the plants themselves flowered into an obsession.

In 1735 he published Systema Naturae, his classification of plants based on their sexual parts. His explicit descriptions — comparing flowers’ leaves to bridal beds, for example — upset the sensibilities of many botanists, one of whom condemned such lyricism as “loathsome harlotry”.

By the mid-18th century Linnaeus had documented and classified each of the 7,700 plant and 4,400 animal species known at the time. He gave each — including human beings — a binomial label (the first word, such as Homo, refers to genus, the second, sapiens, to species), a tradition that still survives. The tenth edition of Systema Naturae, published in 1758, is regarded as the official birth of zoological nomenclature. Linnaeus was ennobled and, in Sweden, is known as Carl von Linne.

On the tercentenary of Linnaeus’s birth, it is worth reflecting on his huge contribution to natural history. Before his introduction of a consistent, brief, workable system, plant naming was a free for all. Botanists could bestow the most unwieldy Latin names on their finds, leaving others unsure of where their work fitted in. And this at a time when new specimens were pouring into London from Asia, Africa and the Americas, the souvenirs of exotic voyages (one of Linnaeus’s students accompanied Captain James Cook on his first round-the-world voyage).

And what you do not know, you cannot conserve. Linnaeus and his flowery descriptions gave us a framework for conservation. This is why the Linnean Society of London, one of the city’s oldest learned societies, is using the anniversary to campaign for more taxonomists, who appear to be declining faster than some of the species they pore over.

Linnaeus’s greatness is such that the King of Sweden has taken charge of a party committee; Sweden is sending a Linnaeus garden to this year’s Chelsea Flower Show. Linnaeus would have viewed such recognition as richly deserved. He once declared, with characteristic arrogance, that “no man has ever transformed science in the way that I have”.

• The name Linnaeus derives from the Swedish for linden (or lime) tree. It puts me in mind of an odd theory called nominative determinism, in which people have jobs that fit their surnames. The most famous example is a paper on incontinence that appeared in 1997 written by A. J. Splatt and D. Weedon.

  On the Linnean Society website (www.linnean.org) you can find a series of articles about Linnaeus penned by Professor Brian Gardiner.

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