William Lobb

William Lobb (* 1809 in Cornwall , England , † autumn 1864 in San Francisco ) was an American botanist . Its official botanical author's abbreviation is " W. Lobb ".

Live and act

Together with his brother Thomas Lobb , William Lobb worked as a plant collector for the Veitch & Sons company from 1840 to 1848 in Brazil , Argentina , Chile , Peru , Colombia and Ecuador and from 1849 to 1857 in California and Oregon .

Among other things, he brought Araucaria imbricata , Begonia coccinea , Berberis darwinii , Cynoches pentadactylon , Patagonian cypress ( Fitzroya cupressoides ), Passiflora actinea and Phalaenopsis amabilis to Europe . Lobb published his reports and discoveries in botanical journals such as Curtis's Botanical Magazine .

In the Santa Lucia Mountains in California, he collected seeds of the coastal redwood tree ( Sequoia sempervirens ). He gave the material to his colleague John Lindley , who evaluated it. Just two weeks later he reported about another species of sequoia under the name Wellingtonia gigantea , named after the Duke of Wellington, who had died a year earlier . It is the giant sequoia with today's taxon Sequoiadendron giganteum .

In 1855 the French rose breeder Jean Laffay (1795–1878) dedicated the famous 'William Lobb' moss rose to him .

literature

• Joseph Ewan: William Lobb. Plant hunter for veitch and messenger of the big tree . University of California Press, Berkeley Cal. 1973, ( University of California publications in botany 67, ISSN  0068-6395 ).
• Ellsworth P. Killip: The botanical collections of William Lobb in Colombia . Smithsonian Institution, Washington 1932, ( Smithsonian Institution Press publication 3133), ( Smithsonian miscellaneous collections 87, 1, ISSN  0096-8749 ).

Web links

• Author entry and list of described plant names for William Lobb at the IPNI