Biography

Swedish botanist from Femsjö, Småland, son of a local pastor who first trained him to distinguish flowering plants. It is claimed that as a child prodigy he spoke Latin before he learned Swedish. He was later a pupil of A.J. Retzius and C.A. Agardh. Fries received his doctorate from the University of Lund and was elected docent (1814), then associate professor of botany (1824), but moved to the Uppsala University as professor of Practical Economy (1834). He subsequently became professor of Systematic Botany (1851) on the death of G. Wahlenberg (1780-1851), his duties including becoming head of the herbarium and botanical garden. A specialist in fungi and lichens, Fries is sometimes referred to as the 'Father of Mycology'; certainly he did much to sytematise current knowledge of fungi and was one of the first to use essentially microscopic characters. Together with the Synopsis Methodica Fungorum (1801) of C.H. Persoon, Fries' early publications (1821-1832) were taken as the starting point for mycological nomenclature until the Botanical Congress of 1987, when it was moved back to Linnaeus's Species Plantarum (1753). His son, grandsons and other members of his family became notable botanists.