Dutch botanist at the University of Utrecht who specialised in the botany of Suriname. August Pulle was born and raised in Arnhem, where his interest in botany was first awoken. He was also interested in chemistry, however, and decided to study pharmacy. He enrolled at Utrecht University in 1897 after a year's preparatory course. Over the course of his studies, however, he decided that botany was indeed his true calling, and became an assistant to the botany professor Dr. F.A.F.C. Went while working towards his master's degree. Obtaining this in 1902, he set off for Suriname to take part in the Saramacca Expedition, returning to Utrecht in 1903 with armfuls of herbarium material to study. The trip also made up his mind to specialise in tropical flora and the vegetation of Suriname became the topic for his PhD thesis. The thesis. "An enumeration of the Vascular Plants known from Suriname, together with their distribution and synonymy" (1906), became a standard work for subsequent research on the country's botany. In the same year he attained his doctorate he was appointed lecturer in systematic botany and plant geography at Utrecht.

Pulle's next travels were to Java (1907) and New Guinea (1912-1913), after which he was promoted to ordinary professor (being the university's first professor of systematics) and director of the herbarium, which he built up to be one of the best collections representing the northern South American region. While he continued to specialise in the plants of Suriname as editor of the Flora of Suriname (from 1932 until his retirement in 1949), Pulle also lent himself to various other topics including the study of peat deposits in the Netherlands and the Malesian flora. He made many field trips to other parts of Europe with his students and was involved in International Botanical Nomenclature, acting as Recorder to the Nomenclature Committee at the Sixth International Botanical Congress held in Amsterdam in 1935. He was also influential for his proposal to classify seed plants into four independent evolutionary lineages: Pteridosperms, Gymnosperms, Chlamydosperms and Angiosperms, a modification of Engler's system.

Pulle was recognised with a festschrift in 1939, while the fifth volume of Flora Malesiana series 1 (1958) was dedicated to his memory. The genus Pullea Schltr is named after him.

Sources:
J. Lanjouw, 1955, "August A. Pulle, 1878-1955", Taxon, 4(3): 54-57.