Christian Friedrich Ecklon
Christian Friedrich Ecklon was a Danish botanical collector and apothecary. Ecklon is especially known for being an avid collector and researcher of plants in South Africa.
Biography
Ecklon was from Åbenrå, Denmark. He was trained as a pharmacist in Kiel. He first went to South Africa in 1823. During his visit he worked as an apothecary whilst also looking for plants with medicinal value. A shortage of funds and deteriorating health forced him to live in poor circumstances. When he returned to Europe in 1828, he had collected an extensive herbarium and published first specimens of his voyages as an exsiccata in cooperation with Unio Itineraria, a Württemberg Botanical Society which had been organized by botanist Christian Ferdinand Friedrich Hochstetter and physician Ernst Gottlieb von Steudel. During his stay in Hamburg from 1833 to 1838, he worked on revising his collection. This herbarium would become the basis for the Flora Capensis by his friend, Hamburg botanist Otto Wilhelm Sonder in collaboration with the British botanist William Henry Harvey. The herbarium was later sold to Unio Itineraria.Ecklon received a travel scholarship from the Danish government and in 1829 he went again to Cape Town where until 1833, together with the German botanist and entomologist, Karl [Ludwig Philipp Zeyher], he collected a sizable herbarium, a large part of which was handed over to the University of Copenhagen and the University of Kiel. From 1833-38, he lived in Hamburg and began the publication of descriptions of South African plants in Enumeratio Plantarum Africae Australis Extratropicae, a descriptive catalogue of South African plants in three parts which appeared. With Zeyher he issued the exsiccata-like specimen series Plantae Africae australis extratropicae. In 1838 he travelled again to the Cape where he remained until his death in 1868.