#twinflower

Gifts from Forest and Mountain

Twinflower (Linnaea borealis) is a delightful low elevation forest wildflower, named for its matching set of pink blooms. The plant spreads with long running stems across the forest floor, often forming mats of small green leaves with numerous pairs of pink flowers. Twinflower is among the many forest wildflowers still blooming, while the subalpine meadows continue to shake off last season’s snow. What wildflowers are you finding in the park?

Remember, as snow begins to melt, please stay on trails to avoid trampling wildflowers just starting to grow!

For updates on what’s blooming where visit https://go.nps.gov/RainierWildflower

Unfamiliar with Mount Rainier’s wildflower species? Check out the wildflower guide at https://go.nps.gov/RainierWildflowerGuide

Linnaea borealis (twinflower) and Bombas (bumblebee)

Spot the Bee

Twinflower Linnaea borealis Caprifoliaceae

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) was a Swedish botanist from formalised the binomial nomenclature [e.g. Homo sapiens for modern-day humans or Felis catus for domestic cats] used to name organisms and is the Father of Modern Taxonomy (the science of naming and categorizing living things).

[Linnaeus in his late 60s]

Linnaeus was the oldest child of a family of peasants and priests. From a young age, Linnaeus enjoyed plants and tended his own garden plot. His father also taught him Latin, in which Linnaeus would do most of his writing.

His father, incidentally, was the first in their family's history to have a surname. He chose the name Linnæus, after the linden tree that grew on his family's land, when he needed a surname to attend university.

His father invested in Linnaeus' education from a young age, an investment Linnaeus usually spurned. He hated his early tutor and skipped school, so he was put on an apprenticeship track to become a cobbler. Had this happened, our fundamentally understanding of the Earth and its living things would be forever changed.

In what should have been his last year of school, the headmaster noticed and nurtured Linnaeus' interests in botany and introduce him to academic botanists. For the first time in his life, a fifteen-year-old Linnaeus finally started to study in earnest.

He chose to continue his education on a track often for priests, where he once again performed with mediocrity. Running out of options in academia, Linnaeus began to study physiology and life science with a family friend. He would eventually become a physician.

[his wedding portrait]

Here Linnaeus' education took off. His thesis on plant sexual reproduction was so excellent that as only a second-year student he began to give lectures to his fellow students, sometimes with an audience of 300 people. He also began to disagree with the Tournefort system of plant classification, then the scientific standard, and started to divide his own.

He became collecting and describing plants and animals, travelling up to remote Lapland for it.

[the twinflower (Linnaea borealis). Named after Linnaeus in his taxonomy, it was his favorite flower]

He continued to travel and then set out to study medicine in the Dutch Republic, at the time a more prestigious country for natural history education. On the way there, Linnaeus managed to get himself and his friend run out of town for correcting a mayor's alleged taxidermied hydra heads.

He received a doctoral degree in only two weeks (more a sign of the standards of education at the time than of any particular brilliance of his). In 1735, Linnaeus published the Systema Naturae.

[Systema Naturae]

The 1735 Systema Naturae gained him some fame and publicity, but what truly made him famous and changed the world was its 10th edition. Published in two volumes in 1758 and 1759, Linnaeus official introduced the binomial nomenclature for animals. Up until now, he had used it for plants, but using the same system between Kingdoms and Domains is seminal in the shift to modern biology.

The 10th edition was also more complete and more correct (it listed whales and manatees as mammals rather than fish, for example). His divisions into 6 classes of animals were based on internal anatomy, and though it has been heavily revised in the hundreds of years since its introduction, the format remains the same today.

There's more of his story--his various tutors, teachers, friends, and students (the primary 17 of which he called his 'Apostles', whom he helped to take sometimes fatal expeditions plant gathering across the globe), his ennoblement by the Swedish King Adolf Frederick and the almost immediate end of his noble line. But we shall end with this: 1959, Linnaeus was designated the lectotype, the single specimen, which set the standards for the classification of H. sapiens (modern-day humans).

[I can't come up with a description any better than the one Wikipedia already provides]