German cactus expert. Friedrich Ritter's passion for the Cactaceae family grew after he moved to Latin America, where he spent many years of his life. He was born in Quentel, a small village in Hessen, and studied biology, geology and palaeontology at the University of Marburg, but before completing his degree moved to Mexico in 1920 with his parents and several of his seven brothers and sisters. His parents lost their savings to a dubious settlement company, but Friedrich was more fortunate, gaining work in the mining industry as an ore assayer. In this employment he lived from 1921 to 1924 at Campo Morado near Pezuapan, Guerrero, before starting up his own mining concession at Cacalotepec. Here he lived alone in a wooden hut for a few years, enduring the dangers and enjoying the adventures that such a life afforded. He later published parts of his diary from this time in his memoir, 40 Jahre Abenteuerleben und die wilde Weisheit (40 Years of Adventure and Wild Wisdom, 1977).

It was after this venture, when he was 29 years old and had moved to Saltillo, that Ritter exchanged his mining career for that of cactus collector. With his brother Elmar and another acquaintance, Lorenz Werner, Ritter spent 1928-1932 exploring various Mexican regions in search of the plants and their seed to sell to nurseries and collectors in Germany. He became a member of the German Cactus Society and was helped by his sister in advertising his collections in the society's journal. A fever akin to the Victorian fashion for ferns and orchids was growing apace in Ritter's homeland, where demand for his field collections, many of them new species, boomed. He thus decided to travel further afield in search of novelties, making a journey in 1930-1931 through Peruvian coffee plantations on the eastern side of the Andes to the mission stations of the lowland tropical forest.

As was par for the course with plant hunters in these parts, Ritter contracted malaria before returning to Lima, but did not let this annoyance hinder his onward plans. He continued to Bolivia, Argentina and Chile all in the first half of 1931, returning to the Peruvian port of Callao in May in order to sail back to Mexico, where he was on the road again within months, collecting in Sonora and Baja California with Heinrich Berghoff (later his brother-in-law). Returning to his home in Saltillo via California and Arizona he suffered a car accident and went back to mining for several years after this expedition, once more living in Guerrero. Meanwhile several experts in Germany worked on identifying his specimens (Friedrich Bödeker, Wilhelm Weingart and Alwin Berger).

After closing his mining operation in Guerrero in 1936, Ritter made two more trips in the Sierra Madre del Sur (on horseback) and the Sierra de Paila before making his way back to Germany in autumn 1937. He remained in Europe for 15 years, spending two of these serving in the German army during World War Two and much of the rest pursuing private philosophical studies. He published three tomes in 1951-1952 of these reflections, under the Nietszchean series title Das offenbarte Leben (The revealed life). The ideas of Nietszche and the prevailing German ideology of the mid-20th century remained a lifelong influence for him.

Ritter emigrated once more to South America in 1952, travelling third class to Rio de Janeiro, his means having diminished over the course of his years of private study. He made his first South American collections in 15 years almost as soon as he arrived, taking some seeds from a tree growing in a residential garden. He quickly moved on to Buenos Aires and began another collecting odyssey through Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru, putting down no roots anywhere over the next three years. Thus were more seeds sent back to Germany, allowing those who had lost their collections during the war to begin restocking their greenhouses.

Ritter eventually settled in Arica, Chile, where he lodged with a German family and bought himself a 1931 Ford for future collecting trips. The old vehicle broke down frequently, but nevertheless allowed him to explore central and northern Chile extensively in 1956, before he decided to order a new Ford directly from the U.S. He broke in the new truck with an excursion to Peru in 1957 and over the next years barely saw his new home at Arica for he was almost constantly on the move, returning to Bolivia, southern Chile, northwest Argentina and southeast Brazil, always collecting more plants and seeds. During the 1960s the pages of the German journal Kakteen und andere Sukkulenten were awash with new species published by Ritter. He moved sometime in the mid 1960s to the Chilean village of Granizo, which became his base for yet more collecting journeys in the likes of Bahia and Minas Gerais (Brazil) and Paraguay. His restless activity in Cactaceae exploration was recognised by an honorary membership of the German Cactus Society in 1964.

In 1968, A.F.H. Buining was welcomed to Ritter's home in Granizo, planted all round with cacti, of course. Together with Buining's wife they made a two-month trip through Chile and Peru, collecting mainly living plants that were shipped to the Netherlands. Ritter's collecting days were coming to a close by this time. He made his last collections in Brazil in 1971, where he searched one day in vain for one of his earlier discoveries, Coleocephalocereus flavisetus F. Ritter. Having no success in the locality 11km south of Engeneiro Caldas, Minas Gerais, and with no transport, he was forced to walk back to base in the rain. It was during this walk that he made the decision to stop collecting cacti. He calculated that he had spent a total of six years and ten months 'in the field' in South America, including a full 28 months in Chile and just shy of two years in Bolivia.

A return to his quiet hillside life in rural Chile was impossible, however, since the political upheaval that had accompanied the arrival of the new president, Salvador Allende. Sweeping nationalisation of industry and violent redistribution of agricultural lands, followed by a collapsed economy and the infiltration of Chile by Soviet operations made Ritter up sticks for Paraguay in 1972. Before leaving, he deposited his herbarium at the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural in Santiago, meaning that his later taxonomic writings on the Cactaceae of South America would have to rely on his detailed field notes.

He lived in Paraguay until 1979, in which year he returned to Germany for the first time in more than 25 years. Living with his sister near Kassel, his thoughts were never far from the South American continent. It was philosophy that came to the fore in his latter work, though. His memoir, self-published in 1977, was of less interest for its record of cactus discoveries than its stark racist world view, for example. Neither did he hold back his less than complimentary views on other contemporary cactologists in his next work, four volumes on the Cactaceae of his adopted continent (Kakteen in Südamerika), which appeared (self-published) between 1979 and 1981. Following the final volume of this taxonomic work, Ritter moved to the Canary Islands, where he lived until his death in 1989, dedicating himself during his final years to philosophising on "space and mankind". The genus Ritterocereus Backeb. (basionym of Stenocereus subgen. Ritterocereus (Backeb.) P.V.Heath) was named in his honour, as are many species of cactus, e.g. Parodia ritteri Buining.

Sources:
B.E. Leuenberger, 1995, "Biographical Notes of Friedrich Ritter", Englera, 16: 13-24
W. Müller, 1989, "In Memoriam: Friedrich Ritter", Kakteen und andere Sukkulenten, 40(6): 137
F. Ritter, 1977, 40 Jahre Abenteuerleben und die wilde Weisheit.