{"id":10381,"date":"2025-04-02T15:31:38","date_gmt":"2025-04-02T19:31:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/carl-linnaeuss-flower-clock-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-04-02T15:31:38","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T19:31:38","slug":"carl-linnaeuss-flower-clock-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/carl-linnaeuss-flower-clock-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Carl Linnaeus\u2019s Flower Clock \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\u201cThe eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his<\/a> waking hours,\u201d the Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne observed in his 1964 classic Games People Play<\/em><\/a>. Four centuries earlier, Galileo had both combated and complicated the problem by inventing timekeeping<\/a> and with it, in a deep sense, the modern world. <\/p>\n

The first clocks were a revolution, a revelation, a civilizing force. The young saw them as a form of rebellion against their provincial, blinkered elders. One teenager wrote:<\/p>\n

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When mankind invented how to measure time, they invented a notion of prodigious utility for the commons; although time in itself is no matter, it is a fact that all living beings are nonetheless under its rule; we hold for simpleminded, even barbaric, such people as do not know how old they are; when we are in the country, without a watch, under a dull sky and unaware of the time of day so that the evening ensnares us unexpectedly, we find it insufferable.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That teenager was the fifteen-year-old son of the Swedish biologist and physician Carl Linnaeaus<\/strong> (May 23, 1707\u201310 January 10, 1778), writing his academic thesis on an improbable and inspired invention of his father\u2019s: a flower clock to measure time in bloom.<\/p>\n

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Modern interpretation of Linnaeaus\u2019s flower clock by artist Anna Fine Foer<\/a>, 2021.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Born into a world where the same plant was known by a different name in every language and in different regions of the same country, Linnaeus systematized and harmonized the lexicon of the living world with his binomial nomenclature, giving each organism a two-part name composed of Latin grammatical forms. Space had not yet been standardized \u2014 the invention of the meter<\/a> was half a century away \u2014 and time was still a local phenomenon<\/a>, even knowledge itself was a chaos of information in the pre-decimal library, but when the twenty-eight-year-old Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae<\/em> in 1735, the living world was suddenly ordered and nature was reclaimed as the commons of humanity, an immense and elegant system of which Homo sapiens<\/em> was just one part. <\/p>\n

Although he had been an obsessive list-maker and cataloguer since childhood, Linnaeus considered time the most profound organizing principle of life \u2014 so much so that he would later liken his classification system to \u201cplacing the pendulum in the clock.\u201d <\/p>\n

In his mid-thirties, he was appointed Professor of Medicine at his alma mater, Uppsala University, where he had studied medicine and botany a decade earlier. His post tasked him with overseeing the university\u2019s botanical garden, so he took up residence in a house at the south-eastern corner of the garden with his wife and their newborn son. Linnaeus would rise at before dawn to spend his day obsessively observing and recording the rhythms of plants well into the night. On weekends, he would take his students on Herbationes<\/em> \u2014 nature rambles \u2014 to study local plants in their native habitat, noting the changes in them across the longer sweep of seasonal time. <\/p>\n

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Wedding portrait of the 32-year-old Carl Linnaeaus by J. H. Scheffel, 1739. (Uppsala University Library.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Immersed in the lives of plants around the clock and across the year, Linnaeaus grew fascinated by the variation in different species\u2019 relationship to time. Just as (we now know) different humans have different chronotypes<\/a>, which shape when we are most creative and alert, he discovered that different flowers open and close at different parts of the day and night, not at random but following a strict pattern. Nothing was known then of circadian rhythms or of phytochrome and cryptochrome \u2014 the photoreceptor proteins that make this photoperiodism possible. Linnaeaus seemed to have found nature\u2019s own clock partway between mystery and mathematics \u2014 a glimpse of some deep truth in the mirror of beauty. <\/p>\n

After incubating his insight for a decade, Linnaeus presented it under the heading Horologium Florae<\/em> \u2014 \u201cfloral clock\u201d \u2014 in his 1751 book Philosophia Botanica<\/em>, listing 46 species of flowering plants whose blossoms open and close at particular times of the day and night: from the dandelion (Taraxacum officinale<\/em>) opening at 4AM and the Alpine poppy (Lieracium helvetica<\/em>) at 6AM to the common marigold (Calendula officinalis<\/em>) closing at 3PM and the day-lily (Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus<\/em>) at 10PM. <\/p>\n

Over the next century, botanical gardens and lay gardeners around the world began trying to plant living clocks. In Victorian England, the popular ornamental flowering plant Mirabilis jalapa<\/em> became known as \u201cfour o\u2019clock flower.\u201d The eminent French entomologist F\u00e9lix \u00c9douard Gu\u00e9rin-M\u00e9neville devoted a section of his 1836 Pictorial Dictionary of Natural History and Natural Phenomena<\/em> to this \u201cingenious idea\u201d of \u201cthe illustrious legislator of modern botany,\u201d which inspired him to consider \u201cthe very curious subject\u201d of \u201cplant sleep\u201d \u2014 a question epochs ahead of the new science of plant intelligence<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Depiction of Linnaeaus\u2019s flower clock from F\u00e9lix \u00c9douard Gu\u00e9rin-M\u00e9neville\u2019s Dictionnaire Pittoresque d\u2019Histoire Naturelle<\/em>, 1836. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At its heart, Linnaeaus\u2019s flower clock was part celebration of human ingenuity in the triumph of timekeeping, part prayerful protest against the mechanization of time that was already auguring the age of industry and our self-expatriation from the rest of nature. Like The Golden Record<\/a>, it was a poetic gesture rather than a scientific one \u2014 a mirror held up to humanity to help us remember who we are: creatures made of time<\/a> and moved by beauty, governed by the same laws that order particle and pistil, that tune a flower to its star and harmonize the stars into a universe, \u201cthe Amen beyond the prayer.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours,\u201d the Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne observed in his 1964 classic Games […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10382,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}