French botanist at the Jardin du Roi in Paris, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort followed his passion for plants and travelled throughout France, Iberia and south-eastern Europe in order to collect them. His most famous contribution was to the field of classification, his system being the first to describe the genera within it. Although an artificial system and superseded by the natural systems of Antoine Laurent de Jussieu and Carl Linnaeus it presided over European thought for many years.

Originally from Aix-en-Provence, his father set him out on the path to becoming a priest, but the young Tournefort was a born naturalist and played truant from his philosophy classes at the Jesuit seminary. He did all he could to gain access to interesting plants in the region and would bribe the keepers of enclosures in order to collect them, a habit which once got him in trouble with local villagers who nearly stoned him to death thinking he was a thief. On the death of his father when he was 21 Tournefort was finally free to study the natural sciences and undertook excursions throughout Provence writing a flora of the Aix region. In 1679 he took a botany course with Pierre Magnol in Montpellier before exploring more of the eastern Pyrenees. Leaving the country for Spain in 1681 he travelled through Catalonia to Barcelona in the company of the Spanish botanist Jaime Salvador y Pedrol (1681).

On his return to Montpellier Tournefort took a degree in medicine and continued to study chemistry and anatomy before his appointment as a demonstrator in the Jardin du Roi in 1683. For several years he worked in the garden teaching botany and continued to collect throughout Provence before setting off for England in 1687. Here he sojourned in Oxford and the same year returned to northern Spain, again in the company of Salvador, and travelled down to Valencia. The following year Tournefort explored more of France, covering Lyon and Rhône. On his third trip to Spain in 1689 he travelled extensively, moving down through Madrid to Granada, Seville and Cadiz and after a visit to Gibraltar entered Portugal where he stopped at Lisbon, Coimbra, Porto and Braga.

Using the quite considerable herbarium he had by this time amassed, Tournefort began to work on his most important publication. After taking over the position of professor of botany at the garden in 1693 (a post he would fill until his death) he published Elemens de botanique ou métode pour connaître les plantes; produced in three volumes in 1694 it explained his classification system and included 10,146 species under 698 genera. Past classification systems had always contained the description of species characteristics but Tournefort's was the first system to describe the shared characteristics of each of his genera, although he never described the species within them. The genera were split into 22 classes, initially by separating the trees and herbs, before basing the other groups primarily on the morphology of the corolla. He refused to admit that sex existed in the plant kingdom. The simplicity of his system meant that it was adopted quickly throughout Europe and many botanic gardens arranged their specimens according to his work. To this day the Tournefort herbarium is kept according to the classification system of its collector, housed separately in the Museum of Natural History in Paris (P-TRF).

In 1694 Tournefort also received a doctorate from the Faculty of Medicine in Paris and later published another famous work on the history of plants around Paris, Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris, avec leur usage dans la médecine (1869). In 1700 he translated the Elemens into Latin and developed the work further, publishing Institutiones rei herbariae. That same year he undertook his final expedition which was to the Levant, spending two years travelling through the Mediterranean, he visited many islands in the Cyclades of Greece, through Turkey via Ankara and Istanbul and finally to Georgia and Armenia, collecting plants all the way. Back at the Jardin du Roi he introduced many new species from his trip into cultivation. Tournefort was killed by a carriage in 1708, the pole of which struck him in the chest two years after he had been made professor of the Royal College of France. Several of his works were edited or published after his death, including the account of his final travels Voyage du Levant (published 1717).

Sources:
G. Becker, 1957, Tournefort
E. Hawks, 1928, Pioneers of plant study.