Carl Linnaeus’s Flower Clock
By Maria Popova
“The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours,” the Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne observed in his 1964 classic Games People Play. Four centuries earlier, Galileo had both combated and complicated the problem by inventing timekeeping and with it, in a deep sense, the modern world.
The first clocks were a revolution, a revelation, a civilizing force. The young saw them as a form of rebellion against their provincial, blinkered elders. One teenager wrote:
When mankind invented how to measure time, they invented a notion of prodigious utility for the commons; although time in itself is no matter, it is a fact that all living beings are nonetheless under its rule; we hold for simpleminded, even barbaric, such people as do not know how old they are; when we are in the country, without a watch, under a dull sky and unaware of the time of day so that the evening ensnares us unexpectedly, we find it insufferable.
That teenager was the fifteen-year-old son of the Swedish biologist and physician Carl Linnaeaus (May 23, 1707–10 January 10, 1778), writing his academic thesis on an improbable and inspired invention of his father’s: a flower clock to measure time in bloom.

Born into a world where the same plant was known by a different name in every language and in different regions of the same country, Linnaeus systematized and harmonized the lexicon of the living world with his binomial nomenclature, giving each organism a two-part name composed of Latin grammatical forms. Space had not yet been standardized — the invention of the meter was half a century away — and time was still a local phenomenon, even knowledge itself was a chaos of information in the pre-decimal library, but when the twenty-eight-year-old Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae in 1735, the living world was suddenly ordered and nature was reclaimed as the commons of humanity, an immense and elegant system of which Homo sapiens was just one part.
Although he had been an obsessive list-maker and cataloguer since childhood, Linnaeus considered time the most profound organizing principle of life — so much so that he would later liken his classification system to “placing the pendulum in the clock.”
In his mid-thirties, he was appointed Professor of Medicine at his alma mater, Uppsala University, where he had studied medicine and botany a decade earlier. His post tasked him with overseeing the university’s botanical garden, so he took up residence in a house at the south-eastern corner of the garden with his wife and their newborn son. Linnaeus would rise at before dawn to spend his day obsessively observing and recording the rhythms of plants well into the night. On weekends, he would take his students on Herbationes — nature rambles — to study local plants in their native habitat, noting the changes in them across the longer sweep of seasonal time.

Immersed in the lives of plants around the clock and across the year, Linnaeaus grew fascinated by the variation in different species’ relationship to time. Just as (we now know) different humans have different chronotypes, which shape when we are most creative and alert, he discovered that different flowers open and close at different parts of the day and night, not at random but following a strict pattern. Nothing was known then of circadian rhythms or of phytochrome and cryptochrome — the photoreceptor proteins that make this photoperiodism possible. Linnaeaus seemed to have found nature’s own clock partway between mystery and mathematics — a glimpse of some deep truth in the mirror of beauty.
After incubating his insight for a decade, Linnaeus presented it under the heading Horologium Florae — “floral clock” — in his 1751 book Philosophia Botanica, listing 46 species of flowering plants whose blossoms open and close at particular times of the day and night: from the dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) opening at 4AM and the Alpine poppy (Lieracium helvetica) at 6AM to the common marigold (Calendula officinalis) closing at 3PM and the day-lily (Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus) at 10PM.
Over the next century, botanical gardens and lay gardeners around the world began trying to plant living clocks. In Victorian England, the popular ornamental flowering plant Mirabilis jalapa became known as “four o’clock flower.” The eminent French entomologist Félix Édouard Guérin-Méneville devoted a section of his 1836 Pictorial Dictionary of Natural History and Natural Phenomena to this “ingenious idea” of “the illustrious legislator of modern botany,” which inspired him to consider “the very curious subject” of “plant sleep” — a question epochs ahead of the new science of plant intelligence.

At its heart, Linnaeaus’s flower clock was part celebration of human ingenuity in the triumph of timekeeping, part prayerful protest against the mechanization of time that was already auguring the age of industry and our self-expatriation from the rest of nature. Like The Golden Record, it was a poetic gesture rather than a scientific one — a mirror held up to humanity to help us remember who we are: creatures made of time and moved by beauty, governed by the same laws that order particle and pistil, that tune a flower to its star and harmonize the stars into a universe, “the Amen beyond the prayer.”
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