Botanist in Florence and director of the botanical garden of Florence Théodore Caruel collaborated with Filippo Parlatore in the development of the Central Italian Herbarium. Born in Chandernagor, city and small French colony north of Calcutta, India, his father was a French official and his mother an English girl from Calcutta. At the age of 15 Caruel moved with his family to Italy where he was educated in Florence and soon developed an interest in the natural sciences.
By 1850 he was undertaking short excursions into the surrounding Tuscan countryside alongside other enthusiastic botany students. Due to this enthusiasm he was chosen as F. Parlatore's assistant in 1858, a role he carried out for four years before he was appointed coadjutor and together they developed the FI herbarium and the Botanical Museum. At the same time Caruel exercised his intimate knowledge of the flora of Tuscany and began to publish his first memoirs, including the seminal Prodromo della flora Toscana (1860-1864).
For one year in 1862 he was appointed extraordinary professor at the Scientific Academy of Milan, but soon returned to a position as botany professor at the Medical School, just as Florence supplanted Turin as the capital of Italy. Remaining here until 1871 he published some 27 works before transferring to Pisa where he taught botany at the Athenaeum. Here he worked even more prolifically and devoted much of his time to the continuation of Parlatore's monumental Flora Italiana, the first volume of which had not been published since 1848.
Following Parlatore's death in 1880 Caruel returned to Florence to become the director of the Royal Botanical Institute and published the first new volume of the flora in 1884. He had soon increased the publication's original 1381 species list to over 5000.
In 1892 Caruel was first struck by an illness which would cause him six years of suffering and which some sources say left him paralysed from 1895 until his death in 1989. Also responsible for launching the Italian Botanical Society, and serving as its vice president from 1888, his rich personal herbarium was donated to the botanical institute of the University of Pisa after his death.
Sources:
F. N. Williams, 1899, "Teodoro Caruel", Britten. Journal of Botany, 37: 258-262
P. Cuccuini and C. Nepi, 1999, Herbarium Centrale Italicum (the Phanerogamic Section): The Genesis and Structure of a Herbarium.
