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quickly set up experimental plots in the Palace Garden, doubtless anticipating a brilliant
future ahead of him.
Koelreuter’s joy was short- lived, however. No sooner had his experimental plants begun
to grow than the head gardener began to complain. Juxtaposed with the scrupulously
designed, meticulously manicured formal gardens of the palace, Koelreuter’s purely func-
tional experimental plots must have stood out like the sorest of sore thumbs. The head gar-
dener clearly regarded himself as an artiste, and Koelreuter’s mélange of vegetables sprouting
untidily in the midst of his carefully crafted horticultural masterpiece were as welcome as a
large warren of rabbits. Over the next two years, Koelreuter’s life was made utterly miserable
by the head- gardener- from- hell, whose acts of petty sabotage, although unrecorded, we can
easily imagine: valuable specimens “accidentally” pruned, weeded, trampled, or allowed to
wither unwatered and unloved.
Koelreuter eventually threw in the trowel. He abandoned all his hybridization experi-
ments, even terminating the ones he was conducting at his own home! Thus, except for one
posthumous paper, all his publications dealing with hybridization were published before1777.^26 Princess Caroline’s untimely death in Paris in 1783 left Koelreuter without a spon-
sor, and, following another dust- up with the feisty gardener he was relieved of his post as
Director of the Palace Garden, although he managed to retain his position as Professor of
Natural History overseeing the Princess’s natural history collection.
Koelr euter’s Hybr idization Exper iments
Koelreuter was a workaholic and a perfectionist whose scientific output, in terms of both
quantity and quality, dwarfed that of all previous botanists working on the sexual theory.
Between the years 1760 and 1765 Koelreuter reported the results of 140 crosses involving
thirteen genera and fifty- four species.^27 Most of his experiments were conducted with three
genera: Nicotiana, Dianthus, and Ve rba s c u m (mullein).
Koelreuter was also the first to study insect pollination systematically. His patience and
meticulousness are legendary. In an experiment to test the efficiency of insect pollination,
he divided 310 hibiscus flowers into two equal groups. One group he allowed to be pol-
linated by bees. The other group he hand- pollinated using a small paintbrush. He found
that the bee- pollinated flowers produced 10,886 seeds, while the hand- pollinated flowers
yielded 11,237 seeds. He attributed the slight advantage of the hand- pollinated blossoms to
a few days of rainy weather, which prevented the bees from visiting the flowers. Fascinated
by numbers, he counted the number of pollen grains produced by flowers of different spe-
cies: a Hibiscus flower produced 4,863 pollen grains, in contrast to Mirabilis (four o’clocks)
flowers, which produced an average of 307 pollen grains. In another experiment, Koelreuter
watched a Hibiscus flower from dawn until dark, shooing away any insect that dared to
approached it. As expected, the flower withered and dropped without producing a single
seed. In another experiment, Koelreuter tested Swammerdam’s claim that nectar must
undergo fermentation in the crops of bees to become honey. Using a glass capillary, he col-
lected nectar from hundreds of orange blossoms into a vial and allowed the liquid to par-
tially evaporate. To his delight he found that the resulting viscous fluid tasted exactly like
honey, disproving Swammerdam’s theory.