Hugo Baum

Hugo Baum in 1925

Hugo Baum (born January 17, 1867 in Forst (Lausitz) , † April 15, 1950 in Rostock ) was a German botanist . Its official botanical abbreviation is tree .

Life

Hugo Baum was born on January 17, 1867 as the son of a railroad worker in Forst (Lausitz) in the house of his grandparents. He spent his childhood in Guben on the Neisse . Very early on he became interested in flowers, trees and insects. The beach on the Neisse, the large garden at his parents' house and the wooded area around Guben offered many possibilities. After graduating from secondary school in Guben, he learned the trade of gardener in the Count's Castle Gardening of Rothenbusch in Nettkow (Silesia). It was thanks to his special skill in handling the plants that Baum continued his training by studying pomology at the Prussian state gardening school in Proskau . After two years he finished the exam with very good in all 34 subjects. During this period of study, Baum mainly occupied himself with chemistry in his spare time and at the same time discovered his preference for aquaristics . The very good degree in Proskau was also the prerequisite for a first job in Crossen . Because of a love affair with the mayor's daughter, the mayor sent him to the military in Magdeburg . Here he served with the pioneers. During this time his only sister Grete married an Alfred Kern. After his military service, Baum went to the old botanical garden in Berlin for ten years . First he had to deal intensively with the palm trees ; later with the succulents and the aquatic plants . He was particularly fond of the representatives of the aquatic plants.

On behalf of the Colonial Economic Committee in Berlin, the Companhia de Mossamedes , and the South West Africa Company , London , Hugo Baum set out on the Kunene-Zambezi expedition together with the expedition leader Pieter van der Kellen on August 11, 1899. No botanist before had penetrated as far into the interior of Africa as Baum, who thus also did pioneering work in the insight into the flora of the southern-tropical inner Africa .

In addition to being employed as a gardener in Rostock, on July 19, 1901, he married the daughter of a prison employee, Auguste Tank from Federow (Mecklenburg) , whom he had known since he was 31 years old .

At the age of 58, Baum started traveling again. This time it should go across the Atlantic Ocean to Mexico . Hans Wilhelm Viereck from Schorrentin near Neukalen in Mecklenburg , whom Baum had known since his youth, had gone to Mexico in 1920 with great hopes and settled as a farmer and post-war settler in the Jaumave area in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas . During his time in Berlin, Baum's interest was again and again directed towards succulent plants and especially the representatives of the Cactaceae family . In the correspondence between the two, Baum asked for some siting plants, which Viereck sent to Rostock in 1924.

Viereck hadn't been particularly interested in cacti before , but at the same time invited Baum to Mexico. Among the plants sent were innovations that can no longer be identified with certainty today. With a high degree of probability, however, it can be assumed that the species described by Friedrich Bödeker in honor of Baum in 1926 as Mammillaria baumii already belonged to these plants.

Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, Baum received an offer from Kernen Verlag Stuttgart to write a book in the same way about aquarium plants as a counterpart to the work by Holly, Meinken and Rachow on aquarium fish . The 73-year-old refused and passed the offer on to his friend Albert Wendt. The publisher agreed, and after 12 to 15 years Wendt finished a work that is still one of the best of its kind today. The beginning of the war in 1939 marked the beginning of an end of privation for the Baum family. Events such as the horrific fire night in 1942 were a very painful experience for the two old people. An Allied leaflet with the inscription “We'll be back!” Did not let them come out of the cellar for weeks: They witnessed the invasion of the Russian occupation troops in Rostock on May 1, 1945 and were suspicious.

On April 15, 1950, Hugo Baum died in utter poverty shortly after reaching the age of 83. His wife Auguste died a year later.

Taxa named after tree

Seventy plants including two genera, namely Baumiella (a mushroom) and Baumia ( pharyngeal flower family ), a butterfly species and two ant species have been named after him.

Works

• Hugo Baum: Kunene-Zambezi Expedition . Ed .: Otto Warburg. Colonial Economic Committee, Berlin 1903, p. 1-153 ( online ).
• Hugo Baum: Allendorff's cultural practice of cold and warm house plants . Ed .: Walter Allendorff. Parey, Berlin 1925.
• (Complete list online as PDF download; 162 kB)

literature

• Peter A. Mansfeld: Hugo Baum - a biography . In: Bulletin of the working group for Mammillarienfreunde . Osnabrück 1983–1984.
• Peter A. Mansfeld: Hugo Baum and the Dolichothele named after him . In: Information letter from ZAG Mammillarien . Berlin 1980.
• Peter A. Mansfeld: Mammillaria (Dolichothele) baumii Bödeker en hair ontdekker . In: Succulenta, Maandblad van de nederlands-Belgische Vereniging van Liefhebbers van Cactussen en other Vetplanten . 1986.
• Peter A. Mansfeld: Hugo Baum - The life story of a German botanist . 2nd Edition. BoD, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-8448-1463-7 .
• E. Figueiredo, M. Soares, G. Seibert, GF Smith, RB Faden: The botany of the Cunene-Zambezi Expedition with notes on Hugo Baum (1867-1950) . In: Bothalia . Volume 39, Number 2, 2009, pp. 185-212. ( PDF )

Web links

• Author entry and list of the described plant names for Hugo Baum at the IPNI
• Hugo Baum - a biography

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Complete list online ( Memento from July 1, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )