German merchant and botanist who spent ten years in Mexico, collecting plants and other specimens in the states of Oaxaca, Mexico and San Louis Potosi.

Born in Delitzsch in the province of Sachsen, Ehrenberg travelled to the West Indies in 1827. He visited islands including Haiti and St. Thomas before settling in Mexico in 1831, where he remained for ten years, employed by a mining company. In his spare time he studied natural history, collecting plants, animals and mineral samples which he sold in Europe. He paid special attention to the Cactaceae and introduced large numbers of these into European horticulture. Ehrenberg was a frequent correspondent of the curator of the Berlin herbarium, Daniel Schlechtendal, who received many shipments from Ehrenberg. Ehrenberg was also acquainted with fellow collector H.G. Galeotti, who he joined on excursions in the mountains of Real del Monte. Ehrenbergia Martius and Ehrenbergia Sprengel are not named in honour of Carl Ehrenberg but after his elder brother, the biologist Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg (1795-1876).

Sources:
W.B. Hemsley, 1888, in F.D. Godman and O. Salvin (editors), Biologia Centrali-Americana, 4: 128
I. Urban, 1902, Symbolae Antillanae, 3: 43-44.