Polish gardener and plant collector. Warszewicz's travels in Latin America provided European herbaria with great amounts of orchid material. Joseph Warszewicz was born in Vilnius (Wilno), Lithuania, to Polish parents, later being given the noble title Ritter von Rawicz. Little has been recorded about his childhood, but he is known to have begun work at the Botanical Garden at Vilnius University, fleeing the country for Germany after the failed November Uprising of 1830-1831. He worked from 1840 as an assistant gardener at the Botanical Garden in Berlin and in 1844 applied to accompany the Belgian horticulturalist Van Houtte to Guatemala to collect tropical plants and seeds for sale in Europe.
After a short time Warszewicz set up independently, cultivating and supplying wholesale quantities of plants to horticulturalists and botanical gardens in Germany, Poland and Britain. The plants he sent heralded a new era in German horticulture, which had until then lost out to England as the recipient of many plants from the New World. He sent enormous quantities of orchids in particular, of which H.G. Reichenbach described many.
Warszewicz made extensive explorations of Guatemala, Costa Rica and Panama in 1848, climbing the 16,000-foot Chiriqui Volcano, living in native huts and subsisting on maize and fruit. In 1849 he visited Colombia, but his travels took their toll and in 1850 he returned to Germany, afflicted by yellow fever. He took up work with Reichenbach studying hundreds of the orchids he had amassed, but soon wanted to be collecting again. In 1851 he set off once more for South America, this time travelling through Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru in search of botanical riches. He also collected animals and ethnographic artefacts.
He was forced to return to Europe in 1853, due to yellow fever, and settled in Cracow as supervisor of the city's botanic gardens, where he remained until his death. His collections were bequeathed to the Berlin Botanic Garden. Many taxa are named after him, though there is some variation in the spelling of his name due to mistakes made by Reichenbach on specimen labels.
Sources:
J. Sampolinski, 1963, "Josef Warszewicz - A famous orchid collector", The Orchid Review, 71: 840.
