Famous German Botanists

Matthias Jakob Schleiden was a German botanist who is credited with co-founding cell theory along with Rudolf Virchow and Theodor Schwann. He is also remembered for his service as a professor at the University of Dorpat from the mid 1860s.

Wladimir Köppen was a Russian-German meteorologist, geographer, botanist, and climatologist. He is best remembered for publishing the Köppen climate classification system, which is used even today. Wladimir Köppen made important contributions to many branches of science. He is also credited with coining the term aerology.

German physician and botanist Philipp Franz von Siebold was considered a pioneer of Western medicine in Japan. His works include the iconic book Flora Japonica. He fathered a daughter with a Japanese courtesan, who grew up to be Kusumoto Ine, Japan’s first female doctor with knowledge in Western medicine.

German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas was born to a professor of surgery and had, by age 15, formulated classifications of several animal groups. He chiefly worked in and around Russia, and is remembered for his 3-volume geological study, Journey Through Various Provinces of the Russian Empire.

German-born zoologist and botanist Georg Wilhelm Steller traveled to Russia on a troop ship. He was later part of the Great Northern Expedition, aboard the St. Peter, aimed at locating a sea route from Russia to North America. The Steller’s sea cow, discovered by him, went extinct later.

Sixteenth-century German physician and botanist Leonhart Fuchs is best known for his extensive research on the medicinal properties of plants and herbs. His work Historia Stirpium is an invaluable treatise on the history of plants. The plant Fuchsia found in the Caribbean was named in his honor.

German surgeon and botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary is regarded as the pioneer of plant pathology and mycology. Apart from teaching botany, he chalked the life cycles of many fungi and also coined the term symbiosis to explain the mutually beneficial co-existence of many orgnanisms, such as fungi and algae.

German poet and lyricist Adelbert von Chamisso, who lived in the 19th century, is chiefly remembered for his legendary fairy tale, Peter Schlemihl’s Remarkable Story. He also established the Berlin romanticist society Nordsternbund and was a noted botanist, too. He was also interested in philology and Australasian languages.

Ferdinand von Mueller was a German-Australian geographer, physician, and botanist. He is credited with founding the National Herbarium of Victoria, the oldest scientific institution in Victoria. He is also credited with naming several Australian plants. Such is his popularity that many plants, animals, journals, and places in Australia are named after him. 

German naturalist and botanist Lorenz Oken is remembered as one of the most significant German natural philosophers of the 19th century and a leader of the Naturphilosophie movement. His studies on Wolfgang von Goethe’s theory on the vertebrate skull helped prepare ground for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

German botanist and geneticist Carl Correns is remembered for re-working on rediscovered Gregor Mendel’s paper on the principles of heredity. He was a student of renowned Swedish botanist Karl Nägeli. Initially a botany instructor at the University of Tübingen, he later became the first director at the Berlin-based Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology.

German botanist Julius von Sachs is remembered for his contribution to the development of experimental plant physiology. He also conducted significant studies on areas such as transpiration of water. He was the chair of botany at the University of Freiburg-im-Breisgau and a professor of botany at the University of Würzburg.

Katherine Esau was a German-American botanist best remembered for her work on plant anatomy, for which she was honored with the prestigious National Medal of Science by President George Bush in 1989. Katherine Esau also made significant contributions as an author, lecturer, and scientist. 

German botanist and explorer Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius is remembered for his Austrian expedition to Brazil. He went on to conduct extensive research on Brazilian flora. His best-known work remains the 3-volume Historia naturalis palmarum. He also taught and maintained a botanic garden in Munich.

Best remembered for discovering mitosis, or cell division, in plants, Polish-German botanist Eduard Adolf Strasburger also worked on the research already begun by German botanist Wilhelm Hofmeister. He taught at the universities of Warsaw and Jena and also won the Linnean Medal and the Darwin-Wallace Medal.

German botanist Adolf Engler is remembered for his plant classification system. One of his best-known works include the 23-volume The Natural Plant Families. He was also a pioneer in the study of phytogeography, or botanical geography. He won the prestigious Linnean Medal for his achievements.

Hieronymus Bock was a Lutheran minister, credited with helping the philological scholasticism of medieval botany to evolve into modern science by categorizing plants according to their structural similarities. His major work, New Kreuterbuch, not only includes detailed description, but also careful illustrations of around 700 plants. For a time he also served as the physician to the prince of Zweibrücken.

Best known for his 6-volume plant catalog Herbarium Amboinense, Georg Eberhard Rumpf came to be known as the Pliny of the Indies. His work primarily focused on the flora he found in Amboina, where he was sent by the Dutch East India Company. It was, unfortunately, published 39 years after his death.

German botanist and plant-physiologist Wilhelm Pfeffer, considered a pioneer of modern plant-physiology, is noted for his work on osmotic pressure. He developed a semi-porous membrane to study osmosis phenomena while researching on plant-metabolism and invented Pfeffer Zelle (Pfeffer Cell Apparatus) to determine osmotic pressure of a solution. He held teaching positions at the Universities of Basel, Bonn, Tübingen and Leipzig.

Being the son of a physician, geographer Gerhard Rohlfs was expected to take up medicine but was more interested in exploring uncharted territories and thus joined the French Foreign Legion. Best known for his journeys across North Africa, he had initially learned Arabic to travel to Morocco disguised as an Arab.

Johann Hedwig was a German botanist best remembered for his studies of mosses. Referred to as the father of bryology, Hedwig is known in particular for his study of sexual reproduction in the cryptogams. Johann Hedwig is also known as the father of another famous botanist Romanus Adolf Hedwig.