BY HANNES THUM
Almost everybody has heard of Carl Linneaus. Most folks that have taken a high-school biology class have come across the name, even if the name is buried in some long-forgotten, murky corner of our brains.
p class=”p1″>Most notably, Linneaus is credited with the idea of naming all of the species on Earth in a standard way—do you remember binomial nomenclature, where we give each species Latin names, such as Turdus migratorius (our local American robin) and Populus tremuloides (our local aspen trees) and Homo sapiens (our local humans)?
He also did some other things, as many smart people in history tended to do. And one of the more fascinating things that he did was to design a clock that could tell the time of day using only flowers. Yep, just flowers. No sundials, no wristwatches, no cuckoos.
Linneaus had spent enough time studying plants that he noticed that a lot of flowers open and close throughout the day. This probably had to do with things like sunshine and photosynthesis and attracting pollinators, he figured, but that became somewhat beside the point. What he did was design an entire garden where flowers that opened at dawn were in one corner, flowers that opened midmorning were in another corner, and so on. He claimed that this garden would be an accurate enough timepiece that he could walk out into it and guess within an hour or so what time of day it was by looking at the flowers.
Patterns in nature that repeat on 24-hour cycles are called circadian rhythms, and our backyards are full of them. I don’t have the patience to garden or even really to watch flowers open and close, but I wonder: could somebody here dream up a clock like that, based on the daily timing of local species? Could fishermen and fisherwomen who know the insects on the Big Wood really well estimate the time of day based on a morning caddis hatch? Could birders know that it’s morning based on a bird’s song, and that it’s evening based on another song?
Or, could it be more like a calendar? Instead of relying on the Gregorian calendar (the one you and I use every day) to tell us the date, could we take cues from regular natural systems to align our year? I could picture it: “Alright, so I’m going to rebuild your roof starting on the day that the kestrels return to Croy Canyon at the start of summer.” Or maybe, “We’re having a party at our place when the elk come out of the high country and herd up in those fields along the highway near Hailey.”
We are surrounded by more time cues from our local ecosystems than we probably realize, even if they are a little fuzzy at times (Linneaus’ clock design has shown some mixed results over the years). And if we tried to follow them each day, we’d likely be late (or early) to a lot of appointments. But, in any case, it’s good stuff to ponder on a walk outdoors.
