Blue Foam Garden

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Although Linnaeus had many disciples, only one ever located any cochineal. In 1755, young Daniel Rolander found what seems to have been a wild variety of the insect in Surinam, a Dutch colony on the northern coast of South America. Creating his own proto-terrarium by keeping the insect-infested cactus in a glass container, Rolander brought it back to Sweden, taking such exceptional care of it that most of the insects survived. When he sent the cactus to Linnaeus’s greenhouse, however, the great botanist was not there to meet it. Instead the cactus fell into the hands of one of Linnaeus’s gardeners, who knew a grubby and infested plant when he saw one. He decided the cactus must be cleaned immediately.

Only after the gardener had painstakingly removed and killed each insect did Linnaeus arrive on the scene. Realizing at once what had occurred, he was seized by despair; by his own account, the ruin of his hopes gave him a “dreadful fit” of migraine. ”About Coccionella I do not wish to speak, never wish to think or remember,” he later wrote to a colleague.

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This anecdote is one of my new favorite history of science stories. The production of scientific knowledge is always, and always has been, contingent on many unpredictable and uncontrollable variables; however, the engagement with physical specimens and great distances that defined the work of natural historians in the early modern period strikes me as generating much more pathos than fortuitous lab accidents ever could.

The above passage comes from Amy Butler Greenfield’s great and readable history of cochineal entitled A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire.