Eugène Poilane

Eugène Poilane (born March 16, 1888 in Saint-Sauveur-de-Landemont, † April 20, 1964 in Khe Sanh ( Quảng Trị province ), Vietnam ) was a French plant collector .

Life

Poilane was the son of a farmer. In 1909 he came to Vietnam, then a French protectorate ( Cochinchina ), as an employee of the French Navy , and worked as a specialist in artillery ammunition. After he met the botanist Auguste Chevalier, who was active in the French colonies, in 1917 , he decided to change his profession. Chevalier hired him as "prospecteur" for the newly founded Botanical Institute in Saigon. In 1922 Poilane officially became an employee of the Service des forêts du Tonkin .

Up to 1947 he undertook numerous excursions all over Indochina on behalf of the forest administration and annually collected between 1500 and 5000 plants, which he herbarized and sent to Saigon . In total, his collection includes more than 36,000 herbarium specimens. Today it is largely located in Paris and Bangkok .

In parallel to this research, he founded his own coffee plantation in 1926 in Khe Sanh, an insignificant settlement on Colonial Road 9 to Laos . He also set up a test garden in which he experimented with the cultivation of tropical fruit trees. The place later gained notoriety as a theater of war in the Vietnam War and is now the county seat of Hướng Hóa in the province of Quảng Trị .

Poilane was shot dead near his home in April 1964 during a raid by South Vietnamese guerrillas .

Several plant genera were named in honor of Poilane, for example Poilania Gagnep. (today Epaltes Cass., Fam. Asteraceae ), Poilanedora Gagnep. ( Capparaceae ), Poilaniella Gagnep. ( Euphorbiaceae ) and Poilannammia C. Hansen ( Melastomataceae ). More than 100 species with their specific epithet are reminiscent of the botanist, for example Lilium poilanei and Dendrocalamus poilanei .

literature

• Jean-François Leroy: Un grand prospecteur de plantes en Indochine: Eugène Poilane. Journal d'Agriculture Tropicale et de Botanique appliquée, Volume 11 (1964), p. 104.
• John Prados, Ray W. Stubbe: Valley of Decision - The Siege of Khe Sanh . Annapolis, 2004. ISBN 1591146968 .