God, the Bible tells us, gave Adam the job of naming the animals. But it was Carl Linnaeus who figured out a good way to do it. Linnaeus, also known as Carolus Linnaeus or Carol von Linne, was the ...

A gardener friend of ours used to object to calling a plant by its Latin name. She heard it as pretense and obfuscation. But after the sage incident, she conceded that there was some point to it.

But in the 1730s, the self-proclaimed “prince of botany” made a contribution to taxonomy that, at the time, was just as profound as any of his other achievements. After realizing that floral sex parts ...

There are places on the moon named after him. His face appears on Swedish currency, and an era of scientific history bears his name. But Carl Linnaeus is best known for creating the system of ...

You say tomato, I say Lycopersicon esculentum. You say potato, I say Solanum tuberosum. But Carl Linnaeus was the real plant buff. Often called the father of classification, Swedish naturalist ...

Carl Linnaeus's use of erotic language to describe plants ultimately helped him to recruit a global network of specimen collectors. In August 1749, Pehr Kalm, a medical student from Finland, travelled ...