From Ashes to Immortality: Olaus Rudbeck’s Botanical Legacy

September 17, 1702

Dearest garden enthusiasts, today we honor a man whose dedication to botanical knowledge quite literally walked through fire, and whose legacy blooms in every Black-Eyed Susan that graces our gardens.

Olaus Rudbeck showed the same fierce devotion to knowledge that would later characterize his admirer Carl Linnaeus. Like Sir Hans Sloane, who would later safeguard his own precious collections that would form the basis of the British Museum, Rudbeck faced the heartbreaking choice of what to save when disaster struck.

How many of us would, at the age of 72, race toward a burning building to save our life's work?

What extraordinary courage must it have taken to continue fighting the Upsala fire even after learning that his own home, along with his precious collections and writings, had been consumed by the flames?

Through his heroic efforts, the university library survived. However, like the great botanist John Ray, who lost many of his specimens to a flood in 1709, Rudbeck saw his personal collections reduced to ash. Yet even in the face of such devastation, his mind turned to the future, drawing up plans for rebuilding the city that would outlive him.

Twenty-nine years after his passing, his young admirer Carl Linnaeus, who would revolutionize botanical classification, paid him the ultimate tribute. Like Joseph Banks honoring Daniel Solander with Solandra, or Peter Collinson commemorating John Bartram with Bartramia, Linnaeus chose to immortalize Rudbeck through a flower.

Here are Linnaeus's immortal words of tribute:

So long as the earth shall survive and as each spring shall see it covered with flowers, the Rudbeckia will preserve your glorious name.

How prophetic these words have proved!

Imagine the satisfaction Linnaeus would feel seeing the Rudbeckia, our beloved Black-Eyed Susan, brightening gardens across the globe!

While his contemporary John Tradescant the Younger was introducing North American plants to English gardens, Rudbeck was laying the groundwork for systematic botany that would later influence Linnaeus's revolutionary classification system. His botanical theater at Uppsala University, much like the Oxford Botanic Garden under Jakob Bobart, became a center for botanical study and plant classification.

What better tribute could there be than the cheerful faces of Black-Eyed Susans nodding in summer gardens everywhere?

Let us remember, each time we spot a golden Rudbeckia in our gardens, that we're seeing not just a flower, but a living memorial to a man who valued knowledge above his own possessions!