Alexander Bunge was a Russian botanist and explorer. He made significant collections of plants in Siberia, China and Afghanistan, and served as professor of botany at the universities of Kazan (in Tatarstan, Russia) and Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia).
Bunge was born in Kiev (in present-day Ukraine) and moved in 1815 with his family, who were of German descent, to Dorpat. He studied medicine at the German-speaking university there, qualifying in 1825. He also studied botany under Professor Carl Friedrich von Ledebour (1785-1851) and completed a thesis entitled De relatione methodi plantarum naturalis in vires vegetabilium medicalis.
After his studies Bunge spent a period as district physician at Barnaul, before joining Ledebour and Carl Anton Meyer (1795-1855) on an expedition to the Altai Mountains of Siberia. For five weeks in 1826 they journeyed across the Russian interior before reaching Barnaul, exploring the mountains and the Kirghiz steppe during the summer months. The plants collected amounted to 1,600 phanerogamic specimens and formed the basis of the Flora Altaica published by the trio in four volumes between 1829 and 1833.
After his travels Bunge worked once more as a physician, in Kolyvan and Zmeinogorsk, where he stayed until 1830. He then joined another botanical expedition, accompanying the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission to China, where he made significant collections in the Gobi steppe and Beijing. In the latter place he found a fragrant shrub in cultivation, which he named Viburnum fragrans Bunge (renamed Viburnum farreri Stearn, after the plant collector responsible for its widespread introduction to European horticulture). The shrub appeared in Bunge's account of his Chinese collections, Enumeratio plantarum quas in China boreali collegit (1833).
Following his travels in China, Bunge returned to Altai, researching the eastern part of the region in 1832. About a year later he was appointed professor of botany at Kazan, where he remained for three years. During this period he studied the flora of the Volga steppe and the Strachan region, before moving back to Dorpat in 1836 as professor of botany and director of the botanical garden. He served there until 1867, when he became professor emeritus. Bunge's final major collecting effort was as part of a scientific expedition to Khorasan and Afghanistan in 1857-1858.
Among Bunge's publications were Plantarum mongolica-chinensium decas fine (1835), Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Flora Russlands… (1851), Generis Astragali species gerontogeae (1868-1869) and Labiatae persicae (1973). The genus Bungea C.A. Mey. was named in his honour, as were Bungeland in the New Siberian Islands and a Martian crater.
Sources:
M. Alam, 2009, "Plant Collectors in Afghanistan", Bulletin de la Société vaudoise des Sciences naturelles, 91(3): 310
E. Bretschneider, 1898, History of European Botanical Discoveries In China, 1: 323-342
G. Sayre, 1975, "Cryptogamae Exsiccatae: an annotated bibliography of exsiccatae of algae, lichens, hepaticae, and musci. V. Unpublished Exsiccatae: I. Collectors", Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden, 19(3): 302
O. Welding, 1970, Deutschbaltisches biographisches Lexikon 1710-1860: 131.
