368 i Flora Unveiled
Linnaeus’s prose style was strongly influenced by the classical poets, Ovid, Horace, and
Virgil. But whereas the pagan poets had celebrated sexual liasons freely, without regard for
the rules of matrimony, Linnaeus, a Lutheran minister’s son, contained the erotic impulses
of plants wholly within the institution of marriage. As in the poem attached to Camerarius’s
Epistola, Linnaeus, too, personified the stamens and pistils as “bridegrooms” and “brides”
whose “nuptials” are consummated in a “bridal bed” of petals:
The actual petals of the flower contribute nothing to generation, serving only as
Bridal Beds, which the great Creator has so gloriously arranged, adorned with such
noble Bed Curtains and perfumed with so many sweet scents, that the Bridegroom
there may celebrate his Nuptias with his bride with all the greater solemnity. When
the bed is thus prepared, it is time for the Bridegroom to embrace his beloved Bride
and surrender his gifts to her: I mean, one can see how testiculi open and emit pul-
verem genitalem, which falls upon tubam and fertilizes the ovarium.Regarding the origin of his sexual system of classification, Linnaeus wrote, “Before I was
twenty- three, I had conceived everything.”^50 Five years later, Linnaeus was ready to com-
mit himself to print. In 1735, he journeyed to the University of Leiden, where Herman
Boerhaave, Vaillant’s champion and publisher, was director of the University’s Botanical
Garden. In Leiden, Linnaeus committed Systema Naturae to paper and published it in the
same year.
Following well- established tradition, Linnaeus divided the natural world into three
Kingdoms: Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral. In Aristotelian fashion, minerals were defined
as things that grow, plants as things that grow and have life, whereas animals were defined
as things that grow and have both life and feeling. Each Kingdom was further subdivided
into Class, Order, Genus, and Species.
The most innovative and influential section of Systema Naturae was his sexual system for
classifying plants, entitled “Nuptiae Plantarum” (Marriages of Plants). Plants were sepa-
rated into two main types of marriages: Publicae and Clandestinae. The latter consisted of
the single class, Crytogamia (Hidden Marriages), which included all nonseed plants, such as
ferns, horsetails, mosses, liverworts, algae, and fungi.^51 Linnaeus’s use of the terms “public”
and “clandestine” referred to widespread customs regarding marriage at the time. During
the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arranged marriages were on the decline and
marriages based on romantic love were becoming the norm. In England, for example, the
absence of laws requiring a marriage license or public announcement made it relatively easy
for couples to marry without their parents’ knowledge or consent by eloping to Scotland,
and such marriages were referred to as “clandestine.”^52
Linnaeus divided the Publicae into two categories: Monoclinia,^53 in which husbands and
wives occupy one “bed” (hermaphroditic flowers), and Diclinia, in which husbands and wives
have separate “beds.” The Diclinia were further divided into the three classes: Monoecia,
Dioecia, and Polygamia. The Polygamia included plants with hermaphroditic and unisex-
ual flowers on the same individual. If the stamens and pistils of hermaphroditic flowers of
polygamous plants represented the “husbands” and “wives,” the male and unisexual flowers
on the same plant became the “lovers” of the husbands and wives. The Monoclinia were