Frederick Traugott Pursh

Frederick Traugott Pursh (born February 4, 1774 in Großenhain , Saxony , † July 11, 1820 in Montreal , Canada ; actually Friedrich Pursch ) was a German-Canadian botanist and gardener. Its official botanical author abbreviation is " Pursh ".

Life

His original name was Friedrich Pursch and received his training at the Botanical Garden in Dresden . In 1799 he emigrated to the USA . He found his first job shortly after his arrival in a newly opened botanical garden near Baltimore . About a year later he went to Philadelphia and worked as a gardener on the estate of a Samuel Beck. From 1803 to 1805 he was a gardener in the Woodlands , a large estate where he helped John Lyon . Here he made the acquaintance of William Bartram, the son of the botanist John Bartram and the Reverend Gotthilf Henry Ernest Muhlenberg . For years he had dealt with the local flora and repeatedly sent finds to Europe for assessment. Both enabled Pursh to use their libraries and had innumerable conversations with him about plants.

From 1805 he worked on a new flora of North America on behalf of Benjamin Smith Barton and in this context also studied plants that had been collected during the Lewis and Clark expedition . Working with Barton allowed him to travel far and wide. In 1805 he traveled south from Maryland to the Carolinas and in 1806 north of the Pennsylvania Mountains to New Hampshire . He always traveled on foot and only had his dog and a rifle with him; In this way, he covered around 3,500 kilometers a year.

Barton's never published his planned flora , but Pursh, who later went to London , rendered American botany a great service, as he processed large parts of his findings in Flora americae septentrionalis; or A Systematic Arrangement and Description of The Plants of North America , published in 1813. Pursh then returned to America and emigrated from there to Canada in 1816 . Here, too, he collected a lot, especially around Québec . However, these collections were destroyed by fire before they could be viewed more closely and the results published.

This stroke of fate hit Pursh very badly, so that he became addicted to alcohol. At the time of his death, he was so impoverished that the funeral expenses had to be paid for by his friends from the Montreal Science Society .

Taxonomic honor

The genus Purshia DC. ex Poir. from the rose family (Rosaceae) has been named after him.

Works

• Flora Americae septentrionalis , 1814

swell

• Robert Zander : Zander concise dictionary of plant names . Ed .: Fritz Encke , Günther Buchheim, Siegmund Seybold . 13th, revised and expanded edition. Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-8001-5042-5 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names - Extended Edition. Part I and II. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin , Freie Universität Berlin , Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-946292-26-5 doi: 10.3372 / epolist2018 .

Web links

• Author entry and list of the described plant names for Frederick Traugott Pursh at the IPNI
• Curriculum vitae