Biography

Swiss horticulturist who collected plants in West Africa, Papua New Guinea and Micronesia. Ledermann was born at Cennier near Neuchâtel, and graduated from the University of Heidelberg. After training as a gardener, he went to West Africa in 1904 to take up a position at the Botanical Garden of Victoria in German Cameroon. Here he remained for five years, during which he made extensive collections of tropical African plants in Zaire (1904-1906) as well as Cameroon. As well as some 6,500 collections, he published observations based on his exploration of West Africa in 1912 under the heading "Eine botanische Wanderung nach Deutsch-Adamaua" (in Mitteilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten). The majority of his original specimens from Africa were deposited at the herbarium of the Botanical Museum at Dahlem, Berlin, and destroyed in World War Two. A few of the type specimens for the 400-plus new species within this collection are extant. Ledermann collected a further 6,660 plants in New Guinea, where he journeyed in 1912 to take part in the Kaiserin Augusta River Expedition organised by the German Colonial Office and Berlin Royal Museums. Led by A. Stollé, Ledermann was joined on the exploratory journey along what is now known as the Sepik River by zoologist J. Bürgers, ethnographer Roesick and geographer W. Behrmann.

Backed by the Commission for the Investigation of the German Protectorate, Ledermann went on to travel in the Caroline and Palau Islands (on Pohnpei (Ponape), Truk, Palau and Rota) in 1913-1914, making more than 1,400 numbered collections. These were deposited in Berlin, where botanists worked them up and published their findings mainly in the Botanische Jahrbücher. (Ledermann's ferns and some flowering plant specimens survived the destruction of the Berlin herbarium in the Second World War and duplicates can be found in other herbaria. When the First World War broke out he returned to Europe and took part in military action in the Carpathians and Balkans as a volunteer in the German forces (despite being of Swiss nationality). It seems he did not make any more botanical collections after this, but resided in Berlin in the 1930s, poverty-stricken by the depression, and then lived in Untereisenheim near Würzburg from 1939 (with a family who had taken him in). He advised on cotton culture in Egypt at one point in the 1930s. Ledermann died in Volkach, his contribution to tropical botany largely forgotten. Among the plants named in honour of him are the tree fern Cyathea ledermannii Brause and the Podostemaceae genus Ledermaniella.

Sources:
Anon., 1998, "Carl Ludwig Ledermann", BGBM Sonderausstellung 1998:
http://bgbm3.bgbm.fu-berlin.de/BGBM/museum/expo/1998/lederman.htm, accessed 21 September 2010
F.R. Fosberg and R.L. Oliver, 1991, "C.L. Collection of Flowering Plants from the Caroline Islands", Willdenowia, 20(1/2): 257-314.