Christian Friedrich Ecklon

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Christian Friedrich Ecklon (Apenrade 1795–Cape Town 1868) was a Danish botanical collector and apothecary.

Ecklon collected extensively in South Africa. His first visit was in 1823, as first an apothecary's apprentice and then pharmacist, looking for plants with medicinal value. Lack of funding and a deteriorating health forced him to live in poor circumstances, selling bulbs or preparing herbal remedies. Nevertheless, when he returned to Europe in 1828, he had collected an extensive herbarium. During his stay in Hamburg, from 1833 to 1838, he was working on revising this collection. This herbarium would become the basis for the Flora Capensis (1860-1865) by his friend, the Hamburg pharmacist Otto Wilhelm Sonder (1812-1881)(in collaboration with the Irish botanist William Henry Harvey (1811-1866).

Ecklon was the author, with Karl Ludwig Philipp Zeyher who had travelled with him from 1829, of Enumeratio Plantarum Africae Australis Extratropicae (1835-7), a descriptive catalogue of South African plants. He later returned to South Africa, where he died in 1868.

The herbaria of Lehmann and Sonder in the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, give also special reference to the collection of Ecklon and Zeyher.

One of his pupils was Friedrich Heinrich Theodor Freese (1795 ?-1876), a German physician-botanist, who also studied South African plants.

Ecklon named in total, according to IPNI, 1974 different genera or species.

The genus Ecklonea - with Ecklon's kelp - Ecklonia biruncinata (= E. radiata) - and Ecklon's Purple Iceplant (Delosperma ecklonis 'Bright Eyes') and Ecklon's Everlasting (Helichrysum ecklonis) were named in his honour.

References

• William H. Harvey, Otto Wilhelm Sonder, Sir William Turner Thiselton-Dyer (Editor} - Flora Capensis:Being a Systematic Description of the Plants of the Cape Colony, Caffraria, & Port Natal (and Neighbouring Territories): Being a Systematic Description of the Plants of the Cape Colony, Caffraria, & Port Natal (and Neighbouring Territories); published in January 1900; ISBN 3768206378