By Bill Ward
Published in The Boerne Star on April 13, 2007
Among those yellow wildflowers that are starting to bloom in the Hill Country is Engelmann daisy (Engelmannia pinnatifida). Engelmann’s salvia (Salvia engelmannii) will bloom soon. Engelmann’s prickly-pear (Opuntia engelmannii) is one of our common cactuses. Other Hill Country natives are Engelmann’s milkweed (Asclepias engelmanniana), Engelmann’s dock (Rumex hastatulus), and Engelmann’s spike-rush (Eleocharis engelmannii).
The scientific and common names of many other native plants of Texas commemorate George Engelmann. “Engelmann” vies “Lindheimer” for the most common person name used in Texas native-plant names. That is fitting. The unique collaboration of Engelmann and Ferdinand Lindheimer during the mid-1800s made Texas flora known ‘round the world.
George Engelmann, like Lindheimer, was born in Frankfort, Germany. He was the eldest of 13 children in a well-to-do family. He claimed to have become interested in botany around the age of 15. Though Engelmann was seven years younger than Lindheimer, they were members of the same botanical society of Frankfort youths.
Engelmann studied in universities at Heidelberg, Berlin, and finally Wurzburg, where he received an MD in 1831. The next year he immigrated to the US, probably to invest an uncle’s money. He showed his continued interest in botany by first going to Philadelphia to visit the noted English botanist and zoologist, Thomas Nuttall, who had been curator of the Harvard Botanical Garden for ten years.
Engelmann apparently was curious about the less-explored areas inland. He went to St. Louis and from there made a solitary journey on horseback through the wilderness of southwestern Missouri, Arkansas, and western Louisiana, searching for geological specimens and new plants. Reportedly, he contracted a dangerous fever in the swamps of Arkansas, but was nursed back to health by a black family.
He then joined relatives and other German intellectuals who were living and working on a 360-acre Engelmann farm at Belleville, Illinois, southeast of St. Louis. This is the same farm to which Lindheimer headed after he landed in New York in 1834. The renewal of the Engelmann-Lindheimer friendship during their stay on this farm was to have a profound influence on Texas botanical studies.
After a couple of years on the farm, Engelmann moved back to St. Louis and established a flourishing medical practice. He remained interested in botanical research. He was the first to recognize that certain American wild grapes were immune to the plant lice that were devastating grape crops in Europe. After a botanizing trip to Arkansas, Engelmann published a monograph on the strange parasitic plant called dodder or angel hair (Cuscuta sp.).
Engelmann helped found the St. Louis Academy of Sciences, and he encouraged the wealthy businessman Henry Shaw to establish Shaw’s Botanical Garden and School of Botany, which became the Missouri Botanical Garden. Engelmann studied flora in the Tennessee Appalachians, the Colorado Rockies, New Mexico, and the West Coast. Among other things, he became an authority on the cactus family.
For many years Engelmann sent money, books, and supplies to Lindheimer in Texas. Lindheimer sent extensive plant collections to Engelmann, who, in turn, sent many Texas specimens to Europe to be described. In 1845, Asa Gray and Engelmann published “Plantae Lindheimerianae,” which made Ferdinand Lindheimer famous in America and abroad.
It is largely thanks to Engelmann’s collection of Lindheimer letters, preserved at the Missouri Botanical Garden, that we have insight into the passion and drive of the New Braunfels resident who would become known as the Father of Texas Botany.
