Ferdinand Karo, Polish pharmacist and botanist, made extensive botanical collections while working in Siberia.
Karo was born in Brześć (Brest, Belarus), to an Italian father and Polish mother. He developed an early interest in plants, collecting plants near Wrocław as a 12-year-old with his teacher Julius Milde. He went on to train in pharmacy and began an apprenticeship in Warsaw.
During the January Uprise conflict with Russia (1863-1864), Karo served as a secret courier for the Polish Government and in March 1864 was imprisoned. Given bail, he escaped a sentence of exile in Siberia, though he would later live there by choice.
Continuing his apprenticeship in Czetochowa, in 1866 Karo enrolled at the University of Warsaw and the following year published his first botanical paper in the Österreichische Botanische Zeitschrift on the flora of the Warsaw area.
Following his graduation in 1872, Karo ran pharmacies in Łosice and Czetochowa before being appointed head of a military pharmacy in Lublin. After seven years he was transferred to the Siberian town of Irkutsk, moving after two months to Nerchinsk. He remained here until 1893. For the next three years he worked in Magnuszew, south-east of Warsaw, and in 1897 returned to Siberia, basing himself in Blagoveshchensk on the Chinese border and then in Zeya until 1902, allowing him to explore the Amur River region and Manchuria, before returning to Warsaw.
During his years in Siberia Karo continuously made botanical collections, rising at three in the morning to make collections before beginning his pharmaceutical work at eight. In 1901 he sent a herbarium of more than 4,000 plants to the Warsaw Pharmaceutical Society, where he later served as custodian. Working in remote areas, he had limited access to botanical literature, and therefore sent many specimens to botanists in Pest, Prague and Vienna for determination. In particular he sent material to Ludwig Richter in Hungary and to Joseph Freyn, who published enumerations in the series "Plantae Karoanae", in the Österreichische Botanische Zeitschrift. Freyn also distributed sets of Karo’s collections to key European herbaria.
Karo made a final expedition to Siberia in 1910-1913, then lived in Latowice, south-west Poland, until 1920, when, at the age of 75, he took on the post of herbal advisor in a Warsaw pharmacy. He died in Warsaw in 1927. In total, he had gathered some 80,000 specimens.
Karo published accounts of his expeditions and collections in Polish journals including Z Notatek Botanica and Wiadomości Farmaceuryczne. Among the specimens he sent to botanists in Europe were a number of new species, several of which have been named in his honour, such as Carex karoi (Freyn) Freyn and Chenopodium karoi (Murr) Aellen.
Sources:
I. Arabas, "Thesaurus Plantarum Sybericarum. Tracing the Research of an Outstanding Polish Florist - Ferdynand Karo (1845-1927)":
www.pharmaziegeschichte.at/ichp2009/vortraege/vortraege_volltext_pdf/L11.pdf, accessed 14 November 2012
J. Freyn, 1890, "Plantae Karoanae: Aufzählung der von Ferdinand Karo im Jahre 1888 im baikalischen Sibirien, sowie in Dahurien gesammelten Pflanzen", Österreichische Botanische Zeitschrift, 40(3): 124-126
B. Hryniewiecki, 1931, "Ferdynand Karo (1845-1927)", Acta Societas Botanicorum Poloniae, 8: 261-265.
