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another admiring mentor, Oluf Celsius, the Swedish botanist, philologist, and clergyman.^48
Oluf Celsius had recruited Linnaeus to help him collect plants for his never- published
Flora Uplandica. It was customary for Swedish students to present their mentors with a
poem in their honor on New Year’s Day.^49 On New Year’s Day, 1730, Linnaeus bestowed
an even more heartfelt literary gift upon his patron, a brief manuscript entitled Praeludia
Sponsaliorum Plantarum (Introduction to the Nuptials of Plants) (Figure 13.1). Suffused
with the lyrical eroticism of youth (he was twenty- two at the time), Linnaeus’s paean to
spring and plant sexuality no doubt drew additional strength and urgency from the short-
ness of Scandinavian springs:In the springtime, when the bright sun comes to our zenith, it awakens in all bodies
the life that has lain smothered during the cold winter. ... This sun affords such joy
to all living things that words cannot express it; the black- cock and the wood- grouse
can be seen to mate, the fish to play, why all animals feel the sexual urge. Love even
seizes the very plants, as among them both mares and feminae, even the hermaph-
rodites, hold their nuptials, which is what I now intend to discuss, and show from
the genitalia of the plants themselves which are mares, which feminae and which
hermaphrodites.Figure 13.1 Frontispiece and title page of Linnaeus’s Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum. (Left)
Illustration showing pollination in dioecious plants. The female plant on the left is being pollinated
by the male plant on the right. (Right) Title page and illustration showing hermaphroditic flowers
pollinating each other.