Biography

Swedish Baron, industrialist and botanist who was a disciple of Carl Linnaeus. Clas (Claes) Alströmer studied natural history, chemistry and economics at the University of Uppsala, where Linnaeus was his professor. Alströmer travelled in southern Europe (namely Spain) between 1760 and 1764 in order to collect plants and send seeds back to Uppsala. In the Swedish Consul in Cadiz he found a particularly beautiful flower which now bears his name, and he sent its seeds straight to Linnaeus. In Uppsala they were grown and tended to particularly carefully by the professor who later named the Peruvian lily genus Alstroemeria. In 1768 Alströmer was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Two years later he founded a trading company alongside his father-in-law, Nicolaus Sahlgren, who had been director of the Swedish East India Company. He must have become quite a wealthy man because he was able to fund the botanical excursions of many of Linnaeus' students, including Adam Afzelius, Anders Tidström and even Linnaeus' son. For his help, Linnaeus the younger left a large set of his and his father's duplicates to Alströmer after his death. The collection was called the herbarium parvum or 'Little herbarium' and it was housed alongside all of Alströmer's natural history collections at his estate, Kristinedal, in Gamlestaden, just outside Gothenburg. Soon after 1776 he employed Anders Dahl to take care of his botanic garden and herbarium there. In 1785 he moved his estate to Gåsevadsholm, outside of Kungsbacka, for financial reasons. Clas Alströmer's father was Jonas Alströmer, an agriculturalist and industrialist famous for vastly improving potato cultivation in Sweden.

Sources:
W. Blunt, 2001, The Compleat Naturalist
A.S. Hökerberg, 2000, Men around Linnaeus: 27-28
L. Petrusson, 1999, "Andreas Dahl", Department of Phanerogamic Botany at the Swedish Museum of Natural History:
http://www2.nrm.se/fbo/hist/dahl/anddahl.html.en, accessed 13 October 2010.