WHEN the Swedish genius Carl Linnaeus published the first skimpy edition of Systema Naturae in 1735 he revolutionised the way we look at and describe the natural world.

Planting Paradise: Cultivating the Garden 1501 — 1900

IN the comics we read as kids, nutty-looking English uncles with round glasses and straw hats followed by rosy-cheeked Enid Blyton or Famous Five children, all with butterfly nets, were figures of fun for us Irish boys.

Richard Collins on a pioneering mind almost lost to history.

HARDERWIJK is on the edge of the Veluwemeer, the long neck of the Zuiderzee, at the dead centre of the Netherlands.

LAST WEEK, hawthorn bushes covered in white flowers lined the bye-roads of West Cork, and the woods were bathed in deep purple with very few shafts of sunlight penetrating the thick canopy of the trees. Those beams that broke through spotlighted thick carpets of bluebells and mats of white ramsons on the forest floor.

THE GREAT Swedish botanist, Carolus Linnaeus, the third centenary of whose birth is being celebrated in 2007, was the first person to grow bananas in Europe.

THE MOST frequently mentioned name in the history of science is that of the botanist Carl Linné.