| Eduard August von Regel | |
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Regel as the Director of the Imperial Botanical Garden of St. Petersburg |
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| Born | August 13, 1815 Gotha, Germany |
| Died | April 15, 1892 (aged 76) St. Petersburg, Russia |
| Occupation | Botanist, Director of the Russian Imperial Botanical Garden of St. Petersburg. |
Eduard August von Regel (sometimes Edward von Regel or Édouard von Regel, Russian: Эдуард Август Фон Регель; born August 13, 1815 in Gotha, died April 15, 1892 in St. Petersburg) was a German horticulturalist and botanist. He ended his career serving as the Director of the Russian Imperial Botanical Garden of St. Petersburg.[1] As a result of naturalists and explorers sending back biological collections, Regel was able to describe and name many previously unknown species from frontiers around the world.
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Regel earned degrees from the Gott Gymnasium in Germany and from the University of Bonn.
He began his career at the Royal Garden Limonaia in Gotha and then went as a volunteer to the botanical garden in Göttingen. He later worked at gardens in Bonn and Berlin. In 1842 he moved to Switzerland to become the head of the Old Botanical Garden, Zürich. During this time he also worked as a Professor of science. In 1852 he founded the magazine "Gartenflora" (Garden Flora), in which he described many new species.
In 1855 he moved to St. Petersburg, Russia where he initially worked as a research director and later as senior botanist at the Imperial Botanical Garden. From 1875 until his death in 1892 he served as the director of the Imperial Botanical Garden. While there he oversaw the creation of some of the gardens (e.g. the Admiralty garden) and the facility laboratory. He was a founder and vice-president of the Russian Gardening Society and a number of academic journals.[2] In 1875 he became an associate member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
In 1892 he was buried at the Smolenskoe Lutheran Cemetery in St. Petersburg.
During the course of his life, Regel described and named over 3000 new plant species.[3] Many of the plants he named were from the Russian Far East and Asia as Russian Geographical Society expeditions where active in this area during his tenure at the Imperial Botanical Gardens in St. Petersburg.
In 1843, J.C.Schauer named the genus Regelia in honor of Regel. It is a group of flowering plants in the family Myrtaceae which are endemic to the southwest Australia. In 1854 Planchon named a species of Cestrum regeli (Potato family) after him.
Regel was an extremely prolific scientist and author. In addition to writing a number of major reference works in botany, he published an amazing 3,101 articles in academic journals.[2]