Sex and the kingdoms of nature

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 great man had some odd ideas concerning bananas. He believed, for example, that the forbidden fruit, which led to the fall of Adam and Eve was not an apple but a banana, presumably because of the fruit’s resemblance to a phallus.

Linnaeus, it is sometimes said, had an unhealthy preoccupation with sex. The Latin names he assigned to flowers were often those of the human genital organs and one critic maintained that Linnaeus’ classification of plants was little more than ‘loathsome harlotry’. His lyrical celebrations of the conjugal unions of plants would be unremarkable nowadays but, in the 18th century, they raised some eyebrows: