Few visitors to London’s Royal Academy, as they walk under the great arch into the courtyard of Burlington House, W1, realise that somewhere beneath their feet, in a bombproof bunker built at the height of the Cold War, lies one of the greatest scientific collections in the world.
Stranger still, its creator only visited London once, in 1736, and it could be argued that his collection should really reside in the Swedish city of Uppsala, where he lived and at the university of which he taught for most of his life. The scientist in question, of course, was the great naturalist Carl Linnaeus, whose collection, as the Swedish photographer Lena Granefelt explains in her handsome new book, The Hidden Stories of the Linnaean Herbarium, ‘has a unique historical significance as the foundation of… describing plants with two Latin names — first the genus, then the species — that is still in use today’.
How it was gathered together, and how it came to lie beneath Burlington House, is a story in itself.
"As a medical student at Uppsala University, the corners of his room, a friend recalled, ‘were filled with tall tree branches, which he had taught tame birds of nearly 30 species to inhabit'"
The blue colouring of Delphinium grandiflorum
Born in 1707, Linnaeus was raised by a poor, but educated family in rural Sweden. His father was a priest, who taught him the rudiments of Latin and encouraged his interest in the natural world, igniting a lifelong passion. As a medical student at Uppsala University, the corners of his room, a friend recalled, ‘were filled with tall tree branches, which he had taught tame birds of nearly 30 species to inhabit; the window sills were eventually occupied by large clay pots, filled with soil to nourish rare plants. In addition, one could admire with the greatest pleasure a so-called Herbarium… among which one could count over 3,000 different species of wild plants and garden plants collected solely in Sweden’.
In 1735, the same year as gaining his degree, the first edition of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae was published, introducing the binomial system that was really to make his name. Up to this time, the naming of plants and animals was hopelessly confused, with often interchangeable common names and no universally accepted scientific system to ensure each species had its own unique identifier. Although Linnaeus didn’t invent binomial nomenclature, he was the first to use it consistently across his work and to encourage its wider application.
After voyages around Sweden and Finland, a stint in the Netherlands and trips to Paris and London (where he met the collector Sir Hans Sloane and visited Chelsea Physic Garden), Linnaeus practised as a doctor in Stockholm before, in 1741, being appointed professor of botany at Uppsala University. A popular and charismatic teacher, he cultivated his ‘apostles’, as he called his most promising students, sending them off on journeys around the world to gather plants, animals, shells and minerals for his ever-growing collections. Unsurprisingly, given the hazardous conditions of 18th-century travel to remote corners of the globe, more than one of them never returned.
Linnaeus was far from being the only scientist to study plants in a scientific and systematic way, or to compile them in a herbarium, but his genius lay in his ability to organise the information he and his acolytes compiled. Herbaria — collections of dried and pressed plants attached to sheets of paper, like the pressed-flower books many of us made as children — date back to the mid 1500s, and seem to have been an Italian innovation. Although all good scientists, Linnaeus included, preferred to examine living plants in their natural habitats or a botanical garden, a herbarium offered the opportunity to compare different plants from widely separated locations and at any time of the year.
'Goethe rated his influence second only to Spinoza and Shakespeare and his huge array of correspondents ranged from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Catherine the Great'
Lena Granefelt's backlit photographs — this is Maianthemum bifolium — reveal lost details of the herbarium.
Most early herbaria were bound together into decorative books, to be admired and consulted in a library, but Linnaeus was among a small group of botanists who realised that keeping each sample on a loose sheet made much more practical sense.
As global trading, exploration and colonialisation gathered pace in the 18th century, new species of plants were being discovered and documented almost every day. Many of them clearly belonged to plant families (such as asters, umbellifers or primulas) that were already well known and dried specimens could be quickly slotted in between other related species. Comparisons could then be made between flowers that had, say, the same number of stamens, or leaves that shared similar forms. Linnaeus’s herbarium was, in effect, an early version of the relational databases that have transformed our contemporary world.
Perhaps his most lasting legacy, however, was the system of 12,000-odd botanical Latin names he coined for plant and animal species old and new. Although hundreds of thousands of new plants have been discovered since his day, many of our favourites still bear the botanical suffix L., meaning they were first named by Linnaeus, such as tea (Camellia sinensis), snake’s-head fritillaries (Fritillaria meleagris), potatoes (Solanum tuberosum) and the English oak (Quercus robur).
By the time he died in 1778, Linnaeus was one of the most famous men in Europe. Goethe rated his influence second only to Spinoza and Shakespeare and his huge array of correspondents ranged from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Catherine the Great.
His books, papers and, most importantly, his 20,000-sheet herbarium were inherited by his widow, Sara, but in 1784, after the death of their son Carl, she sold the archive for 1,000 guineas to a young English botanist called James Smith. Smith persuaded his father, a wealthy wool trader in Norwich, to put up the money and buy a building in London in which to display the archive and, in 1788, he founded the Linnean Society for the study of botany and natural history.
Originally located in Soho, the society moved to its purpose-built premises in Burlington House in 1857. Although it has acquired many other collections since, Linnaeus’s archive remains at its heart and is arguably its most precious single possession. During the Second World War, the archive was surreptitiously transferred for safe-keeping to Woburn Abbey (the Duke of Bedford being a Fellow of the society) and, in the 1960s, with the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over Europe, it was moved to its snug bombproof bunker, which was specially designed to fit the archive as it stood.
Lena Granefelt became interested in herbaria back in 2019, when she was working on a book about the Timm family’s natural-history collection at the Engelsberg Ironworks, a World Heritage site in central Sweden. She discovered that backlighting herbarium sheets revealed many otherwise hidden details and contacted the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm to see if they would allow her to photograph some sheets from their Linnean collection. The results were so impressive that she gained an introduction to the Linnean Society in London and, in 2022, she was able to set up her makeshift light box in the Burlington House basement.
There, perched on a step ladder under the watchful gaze of the society’s conservator, she took the photographs we see here. The resulting book, The Hidden Stories of the Linnaean Herbarium, was published in an English-language edition in 2025. It gives new light, quite literally, to this remarkable collection, accompanied by equally illumin-ating text by historian Sverker Sörlin.