Historical gardening event of the week: 2 March 1887
HERE’S a name that you probably haven’t heard before: August Eichler! A renowned German botanist, he died on this day. It was Carl Linnaeus, a hundred years earlier, who first gave the plant kingdom some kind of classification; he devised the Latinised binomial (two-name) system of genus and species for plants (and animals). However, it was August Eichler who put plants into their ‘orders’. He had the benefit of Darwin’s theory of evolution (published in the 1850s), a new way of thinking. Eichler studied the symmetry of the parts of a flower, and deduced that the complexity of some plants indicated a more advanced development.
He put the plant kingdom into four distinct divisions: Thallophyta (algae and fungi); Bryophyta (liverworts and mosses); Pteridophyta (club mosses, horsetails and ferns); and Spermatophyta (seed plants). This latter group was further split into Angiosperms (flowering plants) and Gymnosperms (pines, spruces and firs). A prolific writer of botanical and scientific papers, his final position was as director of the herbarium at the University of Berlin. Sadly, he died of leukaemia at the age of 47.