Biography

Prussian-born plant collector. Fendler is best known for his collections from New Mexico (1846-1847, made at the behest of Asa Gray) and from Venezuela. He also collected in Panama (on the Chagres River, 1849-1850) and Trinidad, where he lived from 1877 until his death in 1883.

Born in Gumbinnen, eastern Prussia, August Fendler's father died when Fendler was still a baby. His mother remarried, but the family was poor and their son received little formal education. He longed to travel and after serving an apprenticeship with a town clerk, eagerly accepted a position with a physician on his way to the Russian frontier to treat cases of cholera. His appetite for travel whetted, he returned to Europe and began training as a tanner in Berlin, before sailing to Baltimore in 1836.

In the United States Fendler led an itinerant life for several years, punctuated by spells making lamps and living as a woodland hermit. He visited Europe in 1844, meeting the botanist Ernst Meyer at the University of Koenigsberg. It was Meyer who instigated Fendler's plant collecting career by informing him that he would like to purchase specimens from the American West; Fendler duly returned to the United States and began collecting. He took his collections to George Engelmann in St Louis for identification before sending them to Meyer, and in 1846 was introduced to Asa Gray, who asked Fendler to accompany the US army to New Mexico (where war was being waged with Mexico).

After nearly a year in the region, he returned north, and made a disastrous collecting trip to the Great Salt Lake region in 1849 on which he lost all his collecting equipment in a flood. On returning to St Louis, Fendler found all his other possessions reduced to ash by the devastating fire that swept through the city that year. Leaving these distressing events behind him, he relocated to Memphis, Tennessee (collecting plants on the way), and worked in the gas lamp business once more until it became unprofitable, at which point he decided to go back to plant collecting, this time aiming to collect valuable sets of specimens around Caracas, Venezuela.

With this in mind, in late 1853 Fendler sailed south with his brother, an invalid, but found Caracas expensive and moved to the small German colony of Tovar, about 35 miles to the west on the Coastal Cordillera. From here he wrote to Asa Gray and to Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution, who published his meteorological observations. (A zealous meteorologist, Fendler took a barometer, rain gauge and thermometer with him everywhere he went.) He stayed in Tovar for four years (1854-1858), assembling a fine collection of 2,630 flowering plants (nearly 10 per cent of them types) and several hundred ferns.

Fendler was enthralled by the untouched vegetation of Venezuela, despite the difficulties of traversing its wildernesses. "In these woods, where the rays of the sun never touch the ground, there it is where moisture and a cool temperature reign forever. The trunk of every tree and its branches are covered with Ferns, Lycopodiaceae, Mosses, Hepaticae, Lichens, Orchids, Bromeliads, Araceae and beside Piperaceae with many exogenous plants too numerous to mention," he enthused. Asa Gray found subscribers for Fendler's collection of flowering plants and ferns, and he also collected fungi for M.A. Curtis, lichens for E. Tuckerman and mosses for W.S. Sullivant. Collecting with profitable sales in mind he sought the rarest, most valuable plants, regarding his fellow plant collecting resident of Tovar, Karl Moritz, a competitor. Indeed, despite Mortiz's ten years in the area, Fendler outdid him in both the quantity and quality of his finds. However, the profits only just covered the living costs of Fendler and his brother, so eventually he was forced to try and make money from other activities. He chose, on this occasion, to experiment with brewing beer and brandy.

The last quarter of Fendler's life saw him purchase land in Missouri which he and his brother cultivated for seven years. In 1871 they sold up and returned to Europe. However, Fendler was homesick for his adopted country and went back to the States in 1873, settling in Wilmington, Delaware, for three years, then living in Trinidad, where he continued to collect plants until old age set in.

Sources:
C.A. Todzia, 1989, "Augustus Fendler's Venezuelan Plant Collections", Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 76(1): 310-317
W.M. Canby (Ed), 1885, "An Autobiography and Some Reminiscences of the Late August Fendler. I", Botanical Gazette, 10(6): 285-290
M.T. Stieber and C. Lange, 1986, "Augustus Fendler (1813-1883), Professional Plant Collector: Selected Correspondence with George Engelmann", Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 73(3): 520-531.