German botanist Friedrich Fischer was director of the botanic garden in Gorenki and later in St. Petersburg. Born at Halberstadt in the Hartz, his father was a preacher and writer who educated him until he was able to enter the University of Halle. Both of his parents died in quick succession just before he matriculated, but Fischer continued to study medicine and graduated as a doctor in 1804 with the dissertation Specimen de Vegetabilium imprimis Filicum propagione.

It was a love of natural history which first drew him to study medicine and Fischer was never particularly keen to practise as a physician, so when he was offered a position as director of the Count Razumoffsky's botanic garden in Gorenki (near Moscow), he jumped at the opportunity and moved to Russia. Immediately he began to publish papers on certain flowering plant genera, and a work on the rare plants of Siberia, before producing a catalogue of the plants in the botanic garden in 1808.

Fischer undertook a tour of Western Europe in 1821, visiting academic institutions in England, France and Germany and acquiring a number of correspondents along the way. On his return the count of Razumoffsky passed away and he was named director of the newly named Imperial Botanic Garden in St. Petersburg by the Emperor Alexander in 1823.

With the dissolution of the Gorenki garden Fischer had a wealth of material with which to enrich that of St. Petersburg, which was in a state of disrepair when he arrived, and he set about organising and replanting it with seeds from his many correspondents. He was involved in the foundation of a herbarium, as well as a library (also using the material from Gorenki), and at Fischer's instigation many expeditions were funded into the interior of the country for the collection of material. In 1830 he married the daughter of the Russian Minister in Hamburg, M. von Struve, (with whom he would have one son) and the following year published his Monographia Zygophyllearum.

From 1835 until 1845 he and his colleague, C.A. Meyer, produced an annual Index Seminum of the plants at the garden, which included the descriptions of new acquisition and in particular those from Siberia. In this way it can be considered the first journal of the botanic garden. In 1845 work began on a sorely needed reconstruction of the great palm house, a continuation of the greenhouse building program initiated by Fischer on arrival at the garden, but not long after it was completed he resigned from the directorship. In his final years Fischer worked for the Ministry of the Interior as Medical Councillor and continued to publish taxonomic and floristic works.

Sources:
Anon, 1855, Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, 2: 419-422
S.G. Shetler, 1967, The Komarov Botanical Institute.