Important collectors
Below you will find a list in alphabetical order of important deceased Belgian plant collectors who contributed to the herbarium of Meise Botanic Garden over the years.
Theo Arts (1942-2000)
Arts was one of the first and most active members of the 'Vlaamse Werkgroep Bryologie' (1978). He was also president of this Flemish bryological working group from 1989 to 1994. He travelled extensively in the tropics and, as a collaborator of the Garden, he planned a flora of the mosses of Réunion, however due to his untimely death he was unable to complete it. His large herbarium of more than 20.000 mosses along with their documentation has been bequeathed to the Garden.
Charles Baguet (1831 - 1909)
Baguet was a doctor of law who loved his walks in nature with a vasculum on his shoulder to collect plants. After years of collecting he gathered one of the most complete herbaria in Belgium. He was one of the founders of the ‘Société royale de botanique de Belgique’.
Elisa Bommer
She was born as Elisa Caroline Destrée (1832 - 1910): Bommer was a Belgian botanist and mycologist. She was the wife of Jean Edouard Bommer (1829-1895), director of the then National Botanic Garden of Belgium. She discovered her love of plants and nature in the garden of the Royal Palace of Laeken, where her father was gardener. At her husband's request, she focused on mycology. Together with her friend Mariette Rousseau-Hannon she published scientific findings in the journal of the ‘Société royale de botanique de Belgique’ and collected more than 7,000 mushrooms that are kept in the herbarium of Meise Botanic Garden.
Alfred Cogniaux (1841 -1916)
It was said that few Belgian botanists came close to the international reputation Cogniaux reached during his lifetime. Before being hired by the National Botanic Garden in 1872, he taught maths and natural sciences in schools located in several small Belgian cities. Although he never graduated from a university and received no academic training in botany, he became a very prominent personality in the Belgian scientific world.
In 1862, for instance, he collaborated in the foundation of the, soon-to-be famous, ‘Société Royale de Botanique de Belgique’. There, he mingled with the crème de la crème of young Belgian botanists, and with Barthélémy Dumortier, the president of the new society. Dumortier, who was then regarded as the "Nestor" of Belgian botany, supported Cogniaux in applying for a job at the Botanic Garden in 1872. That same year he became an "aide-naturaliste".
His work at the Botanic Garden focused on the herbaria: he created a Belgian Phanerogamic herbarium first, and then came up with a Cryptogamic equivalent. At the same time he was busy gathering dried material from the Botanic Garden’s collections to study the Cucurbitaceae family.
He also contributed to various volumes of the famous Flora Brasiliensis with his treatment of the families Orchidaceae, Cucurbitaceae, and Melastomataceae, which resulted in a high number of type specimens in the herbarium for these particular families.
François Crepin (1831-1903)
Although his father wanted him to become a civil servant, Crépin never granted that wish. He instead dedicated his time to field collections and observations under the understanding protection of his mother. He never graduated from a university, and learned several languages and botany by himself. In 1860 he published the first edition of his masterpiece, the Manuel de la Flore de Belgique. It was to be a huge success and for decades acted as a handbook for all the Belgian botanists. In the third edition, Crépin added a map with the phytogeographical regions for the first time.
Crépin was one the founders of the famous ‘Société Royale de Botanique de Belgique’ (1862), a place where the young botanical elites used to mingle. The president of the new society was Barthélémy Dumortier (1797-1878), both a well-known botanist and conservative politician. He became involved in the study of one of the most difficult groups of flowering plants: the genus Rosa L. (from 1866 on). Through a huge network of collectors worldwide he created a unique herbarium with specimens from every continent.
As early as 1872, Crépin was officially hired by Ed Dupont (1841-1911) to run the Botanical section of the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle in Brussels. When Dupont resigned from the Botanic Garden in 1876, Crépin became director of the National Botanic Garden.
From that moment to his retirement in 1901, Crépin worked to develop the Botanic Garden into a modern scientific institution. In 1895-1896 he made an agreement with the Congo Free State (which happened to be King Leopold the Second of Belgium’s personal colony). This was a turning point for the Botanic Garden because, from then on, some of its botanists would dedicate themselves to the study of collected African material. Quite rapidly, the Herbier du Congo of the National Botanic Garden became famous.
Although he became quite depressed towards the end of his life, Crépin still managed to strengthen the collections of his Botanic Garden.
All in all, François Crépin is now remembered as the director who involved the Botanic Garden in African botany, the father of the first extensive Belgian flora, and as the man who dreamed of a monograph of the genus Rosa. Both his Belgian herbarium and the unique Herbier des Roses are now at Meise Botanic Garden.
Joseph Edgard de Langhe (1907-1998)
de Langhe spent his entire childhood in Knokke and knew the Zwinstreek through and through. Later, when he moved to Antwerp for love and came into contact with other nature lovers, he found that his knowledge of the indigenous plants was very limited. There was a need for a modern identification guide. The old flora Manuel de la Flore de Belgique by François Crépin (first edition 1860) and the Illustrated Flora of Belgium by Mac Leod and Staes (first edition: 1892) were out of date. Along with a group of Walloons, he decided to create a brand new Belgian flora. A team of eight botanists each took care of a number of groups and families. After five years of preparation and collective consultation, the first edition of the flora appeared in 1967. His herbarium of more than 25,000 specimens is a life's work that has involved more than 60 years of collecting.
Hubert De Meulder (1924-2016)
As an autodidact, De Meulder is an example of how important an amateur mycologist can be for the knowledge of our mycoflora. More than 13,000 of his specimens are present in our herbarium..
Serge Depasse (1929-2001)
Depasse was a keen amateur geologist and botanist. In the beginning he studied the flora of Braine-le-Comte, where he lived, but his later research covered a much larger area and included Wallonia and a large part of northern and northeastern France. His publications contain some 20 botanical titles. After his death, his herbarium, containing many specimens of the difficult genus Hieracium, was incorporated in the collections of Meise Botanic Garden.
Gaston François De Witte (1897-1980)
Through his various missions to the Congo, De Witte enriched the African collections of numerous Belgian museums with hundreds of thousands of amphibians, insects, mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles. These collections led to the discovery of many new species. He also collected a great many ethnographic objects and herbarium specimens, which ended up in Meise Botanic Garden (more than 15,000 specimens).
Henri Galeotti (1814-1858)
Galeotti was born in France and moved to Brussels with his father after the outbreak of the Belgian national revolution in 1830. There, he used to visit and take lessons at the well-known ‘Etablissement Géographique de Bruxelles’ created by Philippe Vandermaelen, a place where many Belgian scientists used to gather. In 1835 Henri Galeotti won a gold medal at the ‘Etablissement Géographique de Bruxelles’, but he didn’t show up for the ceremony because he had already left for Mexico to collect geological information on Central America. He spent 5 years in the New World and became familiar with its botany during his long stay there. He even sent crates full of living plants, mostly cacti as far as we know, to Brussels. The young collector returned with a rich Mexican herbarium that ‘Le Jardin Botanique de Bruxelles’, then a joint-stock company, would later buy.
In the early 1840s he ran his own nursery in the suburbs. There he would sell rare imported plants, herbaria, and other naturalia.
Before the turn of the Fifties his company was failing; a victim of the European economic crisis of 1848. ‘Le Jardin Botanique de Bruxelles’ was then in search of a scientist to run its nursery and hired him in 1853. Some twenty years later it was said that the Galeotti Era (1853-1858) was the best time the garden had ever known: he worked to develop correspondence with several other gardens, used his personal network to acquire various dried and living collections, grew the library, hired more gardeners etc. When Galeotti died, the Botanic Garden bought some 4000 specimens from his personal Mexican herbarium from his widow. In 1932 another 2000 specimens, collected by Galeotti and described by himself and Pierre Martens, were donated to the Botanic Garden by Pierre Martens.
Justin Gillet (1866-1943)
Gillet was a Belgian Jesuit, missionary in the Congo, and founder of the first and largest botanical garden in Central Africa, in Kisantu.
In 1893 he was part of the first Jesuit delegation to embark on a mission to the Congo Free State. He installed himself at the mission post of Kisantu. In 1898 he started developing a botanical garden. Gillet researched the possibilities of introducing economic and food crops such as bananas, manioc, tomatoes, potatoes, and rice, and of acclimatising various European vegetables. In other words, his research had a clear utility purpose; to provide food for the colonial occupier, just like most science initiatives in the colony. Gillet's garden was part of a knowledge and exchange network with other experimental gardens and botanical gardens, such as those of Emile Laurent in Eala and Buitenzorg (Java), and with horticultural firms. Moreover, plant samples and herbaria regularly left Gillet's garden for Belgium, where they were inventoried and examined for their economic value. More than 8000 herbarium specimens are kept in Meise Botanic Garden.
Martha Goossens-Fontana (1889 -1957)
After obtaining her degree in drawing from the Académie de Bruxelles, Fontana went on to work as a teacher at the secondary school in Ixelles in 1913. In 1919, following her marriage to the agricultural engineer Victor Goossens, she resigned her position. Along with her husband, who had been appointed director of the Botanic Garden of Eala, she set sail for the Belgian Congo. It was to be a 36-year stay, during which Fontana independently developed into an expert on Congolese mycology. In Eala she started a collection of the fungi of the region. She studied them and recorded them in detailed watercolours. When her husband was transferred to Binga in Bangala, a district of the Equatorial Province (now Mongala), in 1927 as director of the Société des Cultures, it proved an excellent opportunity for Fontana to expand her steadily growing mycological collection. She continued her collecting trips, but now also carried out microscopic research thanks to a small microscopy kit she had acquired. She recorded her observations in micrographic watercolour studies. Fontana also conducted mycological research in Panzi near Bukavu, where she lived from 1948 to 1956. She had a small laboratory there.
After her return to Belgium, she continued to be active in mycological research. After her death, her mycological collection - consisting of 1870 herbarium specimens and 1331 watercolours - was transferred to the National Botanic Garden, of which she had been a correspondent. The collection formed the basis for a large-scale study of the tropical mycological flora.
Paul Heinemann (1916-1996)
Heinemann has been the bedrock of Belgian mycology for many years. He played a leading role in the professional mycological world, as well as with amateurs. His contributions to the knowledge of the African mycology are recognised worldwide. He was an official collaborator of the Botanic Garden from 1949, but his professional career was situated at the 'Faculté universitaire de Sciences agronomiques' at Gembloux, where he taught botany. Besides being a Professor and a collaborator at the Botanic Garden, he was also president of the Royal Botanical Society of Belgium and was one of the founders of the 'Cercle de Mycologie de Bruxelles'. Nearly 5000 specimens from his collections are in the herbarium of Meise Botanic Garden.
Frans Hens (1856- 1928)
A painter from Antwerp, Hens was the first Belgian to collect plant specimens (1887-1888) in the Congo. A few hundred specimens are still kept in our herbarium.
Henri Homblé (1883–1921)
Homblé was born in Antwerp (Belgium) on 3 September 1883. After finishing his studies in agronomy at the ‘Institut Agricole de Gembloux, he was active in Algeria and Romania. In 1909 he departed for China and worked for one academic year as a professor at the ‘Institut Agricole de Kouei-Lin, Kouang-Si. In June 1911 he returned to Belgium. In November 1911 he left for Katanga in the Belgian Congo (now DR Congo), where he was appointed ‘Chef de Culture de 2e classe’. There he was based at Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi; upper Katanga). After problems in the Agronomical Service he left the Service in September 1915 and became Territorial Administrator in Mutombo Mukulu (Lomami). On 2 September 1921 he also left the Colonial Services. On 10 October 1921 he died at Munama, near Lubumbashi.
Homblé collected flowering plants in the years 1909–1913, during his stay in China as well as during his colonial career in Katanga. Apparently no collections were made during his stay in Algeria and Romania; at least they were not given to Meise Botanic Garden. While he was working in the Agronomical Service, E. Leplae, general director of the Agronomical Services of the Colony, asked him to collect herbarium specimens in order to gather information on the flora of the Congo. These specimens were deposited in Meise Botanic Garden and are among the very first records on the flora of Katanga. Some 100 plant species of Katanga were named after him. From 1914 onwards (i.e. before his career shift at the end of 1915), Homblé no longer collected any plants.
Meise Botanic Garden keeps the originals of all series collected by Homblé. Duplicates were sent by Meise to several other herbaria. Below is an overview of his collection; note that Homblé restarted his field numbers with number 1 three times.
- November 1909–May 1911: numbers 1–180 (several numbers with bis), China, Guangxi.
- 1911: numbers 1–21, DR Congo, Katanga (a small collection of grasses)
- January 1912–March 1913: numbers 1–1302 (some numbers (by error?) used twice for different specimens), DR Congo, Katanga
- 1–683: Elisabethville (= Lubumbashi), Welgelegen, Nieuwdorp and Shisenda (= Kisangwe)
- 684–911: Biano (Manika) High Plateau
- 912–1031: Lualaba valley
- 1032–1310: Kapiri valley
- De Wildeman E. s.d. Untitled manuscript assembling biographies of central African (DR Congo, Rwanda and Burundi) plant collectors. Kept in the herbarium of Meise Botanic Garden.
- Robyns W. 1955. Homblé (Henri-Antoine). Biographie Coloniale Belge 4 : 406–407. Académie Royale des Sciences Coloniales, Bruxelles.
Louis Imler (1900-1993)
Imler was one of the most important European mycologists of his time. His critical analysis of every mycological subject was noticed by his French friends. More than once, other professionals counted on his talents as a microscopic draftsman. His numerous critical notes and his colourfast drawings in the Bulletin de la Société Mycologique de France are of great importance to the European mycology, as well as his contributions to the Icones Mycologicae. Imler was the founder of the Antwerp Mycological Circle, of which he was president for many years. 5000 specimens were donated to the herbarium of Meise Botanic Garden.
Emile Laurent (1861-1904)
Laurent was a professor at the Agricultural Institute of Gembloux, was actively engaged in tropical agriculture, and was convinced that Central Africa's potential for coffee culture was comparable to that of Brazil. This explains his particular focus on the indigenous Coffea species of Africa. He also collected significant data on myrmecophilous plants, for example Plectronia laurentii, which was named after him by De Wildeman.
Laurent was one of the first to explore the flora of Central Africa on a large scale. He died during one of his scientific journeys, returning from his third Congo trip on the steamer between Accra and Sierra Leone. About 3,500 specimens (mainly from the third voyage) are conserved in the African herbarium of Meise Botanic Garden. He travelled with his cousin Marcel Laurent, who arranged the collection of the third voyage after his uncle's death.
Jean Lebrun (1906-1985)
Lebrun studied colonial agronomic sciences (University of Louvain) and, after training in the Botanic Garden, botanical sciences. He went to the Congo in 1929 as an agronomic engineer. He went on to crisscross the country for two decades. In 1930 he travelled to Kasongo-Lunda to study Encephalartos laurentianus, and between 1937 and 1938 he explored the Albert Nature Park. He is the author of a monograph on Coffea in the Congo as well as many other botanical works, especially about the rainforest. From 1948 he taught at the University of Louvain. 18,000 specimens are kept at Meise Botanic Garden.
Marie-Anne Libert (1782-1865)
According to Edouard Morren, the young Libert was guided by De Candolle in the direction of spore-plant research. Cryptogams were an unexplored field of study for the Malmédy region at that time. Libert devoted the rest of her botanical career to these organisms. 4,000 specimens are kept in our herbarium.
Jean Jules Linden (1817-1898)
Linden entered the science faculty of the University of Brussels in 1834. The following year, with the support of Barthélémy Dumortier, he volunteered as a botanist, alongside the engineer Nicolas Funck and the zoologist Auguste Ghiesbreght, for a scientific expedition to Brazil, organised by the Belgian government. The aim of the one-year trip was to collect exotic plants, such as the coveted orchids, seeds, and mineralogical and zoological samples. The ‘Société royale d'horticulture de Belgique’ also sent a wish list of botanical specimens with the 'plant hunters', in return for a hefty sum, to supplement the collections of ‘Le Jardin Botanique de Bruxelles’. In 1837, shortly after his return to Belgium, Linden, this time as a tour guide and again alongside Funck and Ghiesbreght, once again embarked on an official collection expedition which was to call at Cuba, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, and Colombia. The first major task was to collect objects and plants to complete the physical collections of the Belgian universities and other scientific institutions, including the botanical gardens of Leuven, Brussels, Liège and Ghent. The second task was to search for economically profitable crops for national industry and trade. This time, the state emphasised the importance of economically interesting discoveries. In 1838, the three joined a Belgian diplomatic mission to Mexico from Cuba. There they met the Belgian plant collector Henri Galeotti at the peak of Orizaba. Linden returned to Belgium in 1841, a year after his two companions. In the same year he obtained funds through his connections in Paris for a new three-year expedition in the Latin American interior. This time Venezuela, Colombia, and Jamaica were on the itinerary. Linden was accompanied by his half-brother Louis-Joseph Schlim and Nicolas Funck.
Jean Louis (1903 - 1947)
Jean Louis was an agronomic engineer (Gembloux 1925) with a doctorate in natural sciences (Louvain 1954). After taking a first position (1929-1931) in agronomy in the Congo, he held a botanical position in the Yangambi Station of the INEAC, on the equator (1935-1939).
Here he put together the finest and most important botanical collections ever made in the Congo Basin. His 17,000 specimens were collected with numerous duplicates and are thus present in many institutes with a tropical African interest; two sheets of every number are present at our herbarium. His labels were made with utmost care and contain very detailed field observations. Many specimens were taken from numbered trees in observation, so allowed him to collect flowers and fruits from the same individual.
His publications are mainly devoted to vegetation studies. In 1939, Louis became a professor at the agronomical institute in Gembloux, a chair that he held until his premature death in 1947.
Elie Marchal (1839-1923)
Marchal’s research as a physicist at the Botanic Garden focused on cryptogams, and in particular on mosses, in his opinion an undervalued section of the plant kingdom. He was therefore a fierce promoter of its study among fellow scientists and amateurs. Marchal's research interests also extended to other fields. His interest in the ivy family (the genus Hedera in particular) resulted in the publication Hédéracées pour la célèbre flore du Brésil de Martius (1878) and his study of the dung fungus resulted in ten short notes (1884-1895). Marchal also published, together with Cogniaux, and in cooperation with the Ghent horticulturalist Alexis Dallière, Les plantes ornementales à feuillage panaché et coloré (1873-1874), an illustrated work in two volumes that united horticultural facts with more scientific documentation. The research brought him into contact with other botanists at home and abroad, which provided him with new herbaria and plant specimens for the Botanic Garden.
Brother Onraedt (1904-1998)
In 1919 Brother Onraedt joined the Brothers of the Christian Schools and was given the name Brother Mansuet-André, changed to Brother Maurice some 50 years later. In 1925, after graduating as a teacher, he took up his first teaching post. The certificate of Greco-Latin humanities, which he obtained from the central jury as a self-taught student, allowed him to study science at the faculties of Namur. He became a teacher at the Ecole Normale in Louvain, then, from 1952 until his retirement, in Malonne. As a teacher, Brother Maurice was already interested in field biology and collected mainly plants and insects. He took part in countless excursions with many societies and was for a long time the leader of the botanical group of scientific camps in the mountains. During his travels in Europe (Scandinavia, France, Andorra, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, Spain) but also in Israel, Madagascar, Reunion, Mauritius, Seychelles, Djibouti, Sri Lanka, Venezuela, Colombia, and the Philippines, he was mainly interested in bryophytes; but many other natural history subjects caught his attention. Several of these trips received financial support from the ‘Fonds national de la recherche scientifique’. Brother Maurice was determined and upright and loved a job well done.He created a large private herbarium containing some 10,000 specimens.
Georges Parent (1937-2014)
Professor Georges Henri Parent was a volunteer at the Royal Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels and the National Botanic Garden in Meise. From 1960 until 1997 he was a professor at the Lycée et Ecole normale d’Arlon and the Ecole normale de Virton.
His collection of 150.000 herbarium specimens was acquired by Meise Botanic Garden in 2007.
Father Vanderyst, Hyacinthe Julien Robert (1860-1934)
Father Vanderyst was a missionary with the Jesuits in the Congo and collected a lot of plant material on these missions. More than 45,000 specimens of his collections can be consulted in our herbarium.
Van Heurck (1838-1909)
Van Heurck was a descendant of a prominent Antwerp family, who as a botanist did pioneering work in the field of microscopic research. Later, he also became known for his research on diatoms. His private herbarium, one of the largest of its time, was donated after his death to the city of Antwerp, which in turn donated the more than 300,000 specimens to Meise Botanic Garden in 2006. Besides vascular plants and diatoms, the collection also contains many botanical artefacts.
Herman Vannerom (1937-2018)
Vannerom was mainly interested in mosses and the genus Rubus. He edited the genus Rubus in the different editions of the Flora van België, published a number of other Batological (= study of the genus Rubus) writings, and devoted himself to the area-wide Rubus-mapping of Belgium. His entire collection, mainly specimens of the genus Rubus and consisting of 25,000 specimens, was donated to Meise Botanic Garden after his death.
Jozef Van Winkel (1932-1996)
Upon his death Van Winkel left a large private herbarium, about 20,000 specimens mainly of blackberries (Rubus). He is considered to be one of the greatest experts on the genus Rubus in Belgium. From his place of residence in Overpelt, he travelled during the summer months throughout Western Europe in order to build up the widest possible collection. The number of specimens in his collection of Rubus runs into the tens of thousands, most of them from Belgium.