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ossenbaCh — Orchids and orchidology in Central America
Garden (Sampolinski, 1963: 214). Warscewicz had
also interest in hummingbirds, “certainly a choice
of interests in which he was to be envied” (Standley,
1925: 354).
Augustus Fendler (1813-1883) was born in
Gumbinnen, Prussia, and came to the United States in
1836 to work variously at a tanyard in Philadelphia,
a lamp factory in New York, and a gas works in St.
Louis, until he discovered that a market existed for
dry plants. George Engelmann, of St. Louis, Missouri,
trained him as a collector. Fendler began his travels in
the southwestern United States and collected later in
Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Venezuela. In 1846
he was in Nicaragua, where he made a small collection
of plants near Greytown (San Juan del Norte). He went
on to Panama, in 1850, and his collections of this area
are preserved at Kew and Missouri. In Panama he
collected, among others: Oncidium ampliatum Lindl.
(Fendler 331), Dimerandra emarginata (G. Mey.)
Hoehne (Fendler 332), Dichaea panamensis Lindl.
(Fendler 333) and Polystachya foliosa (Lindl.) Rchb.
f. (Fendler 334). Only three new types of orchids
are known among Fendler’s collections, although
all appear to be from Venezuela: Cranichis fendleri
Schltr., Liparis fendleri Schltr. and Stelis fendleri Lindl.
He returned to Germany and in the eighteen sixties we
find him again in the United States, where he worked
as an assistant to the great botanist Asa Gray. He
then took up what Gray in dismay called “speculative
physics”, publishing a thin book, The Mechanism of
the Universe (1874). Perhaps disappointed with its
reception, Fendler spent the rest of his days on the
island of Trinidad, where he died in 1883.
The Scandinavians
“Our Genus is Homo and our species is sapiens,
and Linnaeus gave us our name. Thus we write
our name Homo sapiens L.”
Anonymous
Carl von Linné (1707-1778) is called, with justice,
“the father of taxonomy”. In his famous Species
Plantarum of 1753, he set the foundations for modern
botanical nomenclature. Linné was not only the greatest
botanist of his century, but also founded a school of
scientists whose names had enormous relevance in the
second half of the XVIII and all of the XIX century.
Among his disciples and followers we find Pehr
Kalm (1716–1779), who traveled during three years
studying the plants of the North American colonies;
the unfortunate Pehr Löfling (1729–1756), who
participated in the Spanish expedition to the Orinoco
and Daniel Solander (1733–1782), who was Cook’s
naturalist during his first voyage around the world
and introduced to Europe the first collections of plants
from Australia and the South Pacific, and was also in
Surinam (Steele, 1964: 13).
In tropical America one must mention the Dane
Julius von Roth (1737-1793), who was in Jamaica,
Puerto Rico and the Lesser Antilles between 1757
and 1791 and above all the great Swede Olof Swartz
(1760-1818) who explored Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti
from 1784 to 1786, later publishing his Flora Indiae
Occidentalis (1797-1806), where he described many
new species of orchids. And, although no orchids are
known among his collections, it is important to name
here Johann Emmanuel Billberg (1798-1845), a young
Swedish physician who visited Portobello in Panama
in 1826 and made there an important collection of
plants. Nearly 30 years later, after Billberg’s death,
Beurling published his Primitiae florae portobellensis,
the first formal list of Panama plants, based upon this
collection” (Standley, 1928: 42).
Two descendants of Linné’s great school, both
Danes, were protagonists in the history of our orchids
during the first half of the XIX century:
Michael Frederik Liebmann (1813-1856) (Fig.
33C), studied in Copenhagen under the great Danish
botanist Frederik Schouw and departed in 1840 to
Mexico, thanks to a grant from the King of Denmark,
to form botanical and zoological collections. In the
company of a gardener, he soon established himself
in the region of Veracruz and was one more of the
numerous guests of Carl Sartorius in his estate
El Mirador. He seems to have collected also in
Guatemala 23 . The orchids collected by Liebmann
were later studied by Kraenzlin (1920) and Louis
O. Williams (1938-39). He collected in the area
until 1843, when he returned to Denmark, with
a herbarium of 40,000 plants and considerable
zoological collections. In 1845 he was appointed
professor of botany at the University of Copenhagen
23 Ames and Correll, 1985: 475, mention a collection of Epidanthus paranthicus (Rchb. f.) L.O. Wms. by Liebmann in Guatemala.
LANKESTERIANA 9(1—2), August 2009. © Universidad de Costa Rica, 2009.
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