French civil engineer. Born in Lannon (Brittany), Auguste Glaziou arrived in Brazil in 1858 at the age of 25, after qualifying as an engineer in Paris. Soon he was appointed General Director of Public Gardens for the city of Rio de Janeiro, duties which later expanded to include the entire state and its forests. He began to botanize almost immediately, gradually extending his explorations across the state as far as Serra dos Orgues and Serra de Hatiaia. He later made excursions to Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and, three times, to Espiritu Santo, and spent his last two years in Brazil on an extensive exploration of the state of Goyaz.
His resulting herbarium amounted to more than 24,000 numbers, representing 12,000 species. Where possible, each number was collected in at least ten duplicate sets that were deposited in Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Kew, St Petersburg, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Geneva, Montpellier, Rio de Janeiro, and sometimes to others. Glaziou also sent seeds and live plants to European botanical gardens.
In 1895 he retired and returned to France, settling in Bouscat, near Bordeaux, where he spent his last years organising and studying his collections. He published nothing until 1905, when the first volume of his 'Plantae Brasiliae Centralis a Glaziou lectae' appeared in the Bulletin de la Société de la France. It enumerates systematically the species in his collection, with precise localities, especially important as his distributions generally did not come with any additional information apart from their numbers. He died of a pulmonary infection soon after the publication of the second volume. He is commemorated in the names of hundreds of species and several genera: Glaziova Bureau (Bignoniaceae), Glaziostelma E. Fourn. (Asclepidaceae), Glaziophyton Franch. (Poaceae), Bisglaziovia Cogn. (Melatomaceae), Glaziophytum Cogn. (Melastomaceae), Neoglaziovia Metz (Bromeliaceae) and Glaziocharis Taub. (Burmanniaceae).
Sources:
A. Cogniaux, 1906, "Notice biographique sur Auguste Glaziou", Bulletin de la Société Royale de Botanique de Belgique, 43: 365-369.
