Biography

French monk and botanist who documented more than 4,000 plants and more than 1,000 animals from the Caribbean and Central America in the late 17th century. Among the genera Plumier discovered are Begonia L., Fuchsia L., Lobelia L., Magnolia L. and Plumeria Tourne. ex L. (the frangipani, named in his honour).

Charles Plumier was born in Marseille and joined the Minim religious order when he was 16 years old, applying himself to the study of mathematics and physics. He also became an excellent draughtsman, as later demonstrated by his thousands of drawings from the Americas. He began to study botany when he was sent to a monastery in Rome and continued to learn about plants from Joseph Pitton de Tournefort on his return to France. He accompanied Tournefort on a number of collecting trips in France before joining the royal botanist, J.D. Surian, in 1689 on an expedition to Martinique and Haiti commissioned by the French crown. The pair divided their tasks so that Surian, a physician, collected and examined the islands' medicinal plants, while Plumier, with his excellent drawing skills, documented and classified their physical characteristics. No specimens collected by Plumier during this voyage survive, but his drawings and Surian's herbarium reached Paris safely. Although the two men quarrelled on their 18-month trip, Plumier later named a genus in honour of his companion (Suriana Plum.).

Plumier published his first work, Description des plantes de l'Amérique, and was appointed royal botanist to King Louis XIV in 1693 (Surian had died after accidentally poisoning himself and his family with a herbal concoction supposed to be a mild purgative!). In the same year he left again for the West Indies, this time with the Dominican missionary Jean-Baptist Labat. Stationed in Sainte-Domingue (Haiti), Plumier collected 924 new plant species (including 100 new genera) and made zoological observations including that cochineal, used as a textile dye, was in fact an insect. He made a third trip in 1695, when he also visited the coast of Central America. While in Martinique at this time he discovered the decorative shrub, Fuchsia L.

The English zoologist Martin Lister visited Plumier in 1698 in Paris, where he saw many of his drawings from the voyages, and was suitably impressed. Plumier, however, was not able to visit England and meet those with whom he longed to speak such as Hans Sloane and John Ray, for the wearing of his obligatory black wool habit was at the time banned in public in England. Instead, he set out on a fourth expedition, to find the cinchona tree in Peru. And yet it was not to be; he was struck down with an attack of pleurisy and died before setting sail near Cadiz in 1704.

He had completed another impressive work in his last year, Nova plantarum americanarum genera (1703), and left the manuscript of another, Traité des fougères de l'Amérique. The latter was a magnificent monograph on ferns of the West Indies, with copper plates prepared by Plumier ready for its publication, which took place in 1705. Despite publishing few works in his lifetime, Plumier's tremendous observations and artistic records of the plants of the Caribbean laid the foundations of botany in the West Indies. At his death he left some 6,000 drawings from his time overseas, two-thirds of which were of plants. The botanist Herman Boerhaave had 508 of these copied (now in Groningen) and they were later published in Amsterdam (1755-1760) by Joannes Burman.

Before the latter work was published, Burman sent proof plates to Linnaeus, enabling him to include these Plumier species in his 1759 edition of Systema naturae and providing the iconotypes for some West Indian species. Linnaeus was so taken with these illustrations that he pasted them onto the walls of his house at Hammarby. He was also taken with Plumier's revival of the Ancient Greek tradition of naming genera after people. For example the begonia was named after the benefactor of Plumier's first West Indian sojourn, Michel Begon, an administrator in the French court. Brunfelsia L., Fuchsia L. and Sloanea L. were all coined by Plumier, too, and verified by Linnaeus, who took up this form of nomenclature with enthusiasm, honouring several of his own patrons in plant names. All Plumier's original drawings and manuscripts are in the library of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. He also wrote a famous work on woodturning (The Art of Woodturning, 1701) translated into several languages in later editions.

Sources:
P.E. Berry, 1982, "The Systematics and Evolution of Fuchsia Sect. Fuchsia (Onagraceae)", Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 69(1): 66
M. Maurer, 1978, "Charles Plumier", The Begonian, 45: 228-231
R. Mottram, 2002, "Charles Plumier, the King's Botanist", Bradleya, 20: 79-86
R.R. Rodríguez, W. Greuter and C. Plumier, 1999, "Charles Plumier's Drawings of American Plants and the Nomenclature of Early Caribbean Aristolochia", Taxon, 48(4): 677-679
J. Rompel, The Original Catholic Encyclopedia, Charles Plumier:
http://oce.catholic.com/index.php?title=Charles_Plumier
W.T. Stearn, 1988, "Carl Linnaeus's Acquaintance with Tropical Plants", Taxon, 37(3): 780
J.O. Wright, 1980, "Charles Plumier", The Garden, 105(2): 76-77.