Finnish lichenologist. Born in Pieksämäki, Central Finland, Edward Vainio grew up in the district of Hollola, where his father, a bailiff, was transferred in the 1860s, near Lake Vesijärvi. There he was befriended by the son of the neighbouring family, the noted plant geographer Johan Petter Norrlin, at that time still a student, who transmitted to him an interest in cryptogams, especially lichens. Norrlin became his brother-in-law in 1873.
During the summers of 1868 and 1869, Vainio devoted himself to collecting plants, supplying valuable material and information for Norrlin's flora of southeastern Tavastland, which was published in 1870. At university, Vainio specialised in the study of lichens, whilst also having a thorough grasp of plant geography from his early years working under Norrlin's guidance. In the summers of 1873 and 1874, he collected 472 different species of lichens in the parishes of Luhanka and Korpilanti in Central Finland, and another 324 species during excursions in the spring of 1875 while teaching maths and science in the town of Viipuri. His first publications, in 1878, based on his own collections and field work, hold a prominent position in Finnish botanical history, being the first publications in plant geography in the Finnish language.
In 1880, while also maintaining himself as a schoolmaster, he became a lecturer in botany at the University of Helsinki, and grants from the university made it possible for him to travel and study abroad. He visited Rostock and Berlin in 1882, and St Petersburg, Moscow, Vienna, Geneva, Paris, and London in 1884-1885. In the first part of 1885, he made a botanical expedition to Brazil and collected lichens in the vicinity of Rio de Janeiro and in the province of Minas Gerais. These studies and travels enabled the publication in two volumes of his notable Monographia Cladoniarum (1884, 1887), and of his "Etude sur la classification naturelle et la morphologie des lichens de Brésil, I-II" (1890), which gave him a reputation as a prominent expert on tropical lichens. His Brazilian collections were distributed in eight sets, although some of them were incomplete. He also published a popular account of his Brazilian travels, Matkustus Brasiliassa. Kurausluonosta ja Kansoista Brasiliassa (Travels in Brazil. Nature and People in Brazil), in 1888. His later publications were the result of his work on lichens received from collectors in many parts of the world. During the last 11 years of his life, he devoted most of his energy to a flora of his own country, the Lichenographia Jennica, the last volume of which was unfinished at the time of his death. In total, he described about 1700 species new to science as well as many new genera.
Vainio was a Finnish nationalist, but, having bitterly lost the competition for the botanical professorship at the University of Helsinki, he accepted an appointment in 1891 as censor in the press service of Helsinki, to the consternation of his compatriots. When measures of Russification were intensified after 1899, he became virtually a social outcast. With the liberation of Finland in 1917, censorship of the press was swept away and Vainio found himself with no appointment and no pension. Reduced to living on his modest savings in mean housing, he transferred his microscope and library from his private rooms to the Botanical Institution of the university and worked from there on foreign determinations and his Finnish flora. Relief came in 1919 when his herbarium and library were purchased for the new university at Turku. Vainio was given a stipend to bring his specimens, tens of thousands of them, including 7000 specimens of vascular plants, mostly from Brazil, up to museum standard; and from 1922 until his death, lived on a small salary in Turku as adjunct professor and curator of the cryptogamic herbarium, returning each summer to be with his family, who were prevented by these straitened circumstances from joining him.
Sources:
K. Linkola, 1934, "Edvard August Vainio 1853-1929", Acta Societas pro Fauna et Flora Fennica 57(3): 28.
