Franz Buxbaum

Franz Buxbaum (born February 25, 1900 in Liebenau ; † February 7, 1979 in Fürstenfeld ) was an Austrian botanist who was particularly concerned with the morphology of the cactus plants. He was a founding member of the International Organization for Succulent Research . Its official botanical author's abbreviation is “ Buxb. ".

Life

Franz Buxbaum was the son of a kuk officer and first attended elementary school and then the state grammar school in Graz . After graduating from high school , he entered the army in March 1918. After the end of the First World War he became a member of the Freikorps "Deutsche Studentenwehr Graz" and enrolled at the philosophical faculty of the Karl-Franzens-University Graz for natural science and chemistry for the winter semester 1918/19. In the winter semester of 1921/22 he became Karl Fritsch's assistant at the Institute for Systematic Botany in Graz and a demonstrator at the Graz Botanical Garden . On October 10, 1922, Buxbaum with a thesis on the comparative anatomy of the subfamily of the plant family of Melanthioideae melanthiaceae (Melanthiaceae) for Dr. phil. PhD.

On October 1, 1923, he began working as a research assistant with Richard Wettstein at the Botanical Institute of the University of Vienna . Together with Bruno Schussnig (1892–1976) he went on a study trip to Tunisia from April to May 1924 . He lost his post at the Botanical Institute on March 31, 1925 due to job cuts, but was able to work as a demonstrator at the Botanical Institute of the University of Vienna for another year.

Since April 1926, finally unemployed, he enrolled again at the University of Graz and the Graz University of Technology to prepare for the teaching examination for secondary schools and an examination in food chemistry . At the same time he works as a volunteer at the State Research Institute for Food in Graz and tried to earn a living with articles for magazines, mainly for the magazine Mikrokosmos .

On June 28, 1929, Buxbaum received the teaching qualification for secondary schools, completed a probationary year at the 2nd Federal Realschule in Graz and was hired on September 16, 1930 as an assistant teacher at the Fürstenfeld Federal Realgymnasium . In the same year he married Friedl Matelik.

In 1933 Buxbaum was appointed professor. He carried out morphological-phylogenetic studies of the Lilioideae and in 1937 submitted a habilitation request on this subject, which was not accepted until February 11, 1941. From 1940 to 1944 he was acting head of the Fürstenfeld high school. In 1944 he was drafted into the German armed forces .

After the end of the Second World War , Buxbaum was transferred to the Bundesrealschule in Judenburg . He taught there until the end of 1960, when he had to retire from secondary school for health reasons. His work as a lecturer for systematic botany at the University of Graz, which he had exercised since receiving the venia docendi on January 20, 1954, he had to give up in 1968 after an operation for a bronchial carcinoma . In December 1972 he received the “golden doctoral diploma” from the University of Graz.

In 1978 he moved from Judenburg to Fürstenfeld to a retirement home in the "Augustinerhof" housing estate. Franz Buxbaum died on February 7, 1979 to cancer .

Act

The first reason for him to deal with the cactus family was a public lecture that he gave in Graz and that was published in the journal Der Naturforscher in 1930 under the title Home and Body Shapes of Cacti . On the basis of this article he edited the entry "Cacti" in 1931 for the 15th edition of the Großer Brockhaus . Numerous magazine articles followed, for example in the magazines Kakteenkunde and Der Kakteenfreund .

From 1935 on, Buxbaum published in the yearbook of the German Cactus Society . At the annual general meetings of the German Cactus Society in 1936 in Düsseldorf and 1938 in Essen , in which he participated as a guest of honor, he met Hans Krainz and Curt Backeberg , among others . With Backeberg there were fierce scientific disputes later, because Buxbaum dealt critically with his extreme fragmentation of species and genera as well as his idiosyncratic phytographic methods.

In 1950 Buxbaum was one of the founding members of the International Organization for Succulent Research and was elected chairman of the 1st International Congress of Succulent Researchers. In 1951 he traveled to the Jardí Botànic Marimurtra of the Karl Faust Foundation in Blanes and the Exotic Garden of Monaco for study purposes . An invitation to a six-month stay brought him to Berkeley as a visiting professor on a combined Fulbright and Smith-Mundt scholarship , where he made contact with the American cactus specialists Paul Clifford Hutchison (1924–1997), Norman Hill Boke , George Edmund Lindsay ( 1916–2002) and Reid Venable Moran (1916–2010) and conducted field studies in Arizona and Southern California .

For many years, Buxbaum studied the morphology of cacti, especially their seeds and flowers . Building on this, he and Johannes Endler developed a phylogenetic system for the cactus family in 1955 . In it he accepted the subfamilies introduced by Karl Moritz Schumann and divided the large subfamily Cactoideae into nine tribes : Leptocereeae , Hylocereeae , Pachycereeae , Browningieae , Cereeae , Trichocereeae , Notocacteae , Echinocereae and Cacteae . He further subdivided these tribes into subtribes and ranks . With only minor changes, this system is the basis for the modern systematics of the cactus family . The representation of the cacti in the work Die Krainz published by Hans Krainz from 1956 , of which Buxbaum was co-editor and for which he wrote the introductory chapters Morphology and System as well as the general part for many genres, was based on it.

His materials relating to cacti were donated to the herbarium of the Zurich Succulent Collection .

Honors

Curt Backeberg named the genus Neobuxbaumia of the plant family of the cactus plants (Cactaceae) in his honor .

Fonts (selection)

• Morphology of cacti. I. Roots and stems. II. Flower. III. Fruit and seeds . Pasadena: Abbey Garden Press 1950–1955. With Edwin Bernard Kuntz, Jr. (Editor)?
• Basics and methods of a renewal of the systematics of the higher plants: The demand for dynamic systematics in the field of flowering plants . Vienna: Springer, 1951.
• Cactus care, biologically correct: care, breeding, description of the genera . Stuttgart: Franckh, 1959.
• Cactus life. A biological chat for every nature lover . Albert Philler Published by Minden 1980.
• The plant family of the cacti . 3rd edition, Minden 1982. (with Johannes Endler )

proof

literature

• Edward F. Anderson : The Cactus Family . Timber Press: Portland (Oregon), 2001, pp. 98-99. ISBN 0-88192-498-9 .
• Walther Haage : cacti from A to Z . 3rd edition, Quelle & Meyer Verlag: Heidelberg, 1986. ISBN 3-494-01142-7 .
• BE Leuenberger: Franz Buxbaum 1900–1979 . In: Willdenowia . Volume 10, 1980, pp. 87-105 (JSTOR) .
• GF Smith, H.-D. Ihlenfeldt, J. Thiede, U. Eggli, D. Metzing: The International Organization for Succulent Plant Study (IOS): Its Role and Potential Services to the International Scientific Community . In: Taxon . Volume 48, No. 4, November 1999, pp. 715-720.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ A Short Chronicle of 50 Years of IOS ( Memento from September 5, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
2. ↑ Leaves for cactus research . Volksdorf 1938, No. 6, pp. 8 and 21.
3. ↑ Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names . Extended Edition. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin, Free University Berlin Berlin 2018. [1]

Web links

• Author entry and list of the plant names described for Franz Buxbaum at the IPNI
• Entry with photo in Mexikon