Biography

Ivan Ivanovich Redowsky, also known as Jan Redovsky, was a Lithuanian botanist with the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Born in Memel (now Klaipeda, Lithuania), Redowsky studied at the universities of Königsberg (Kaliningrad) and Leipzig. Moving to Moscow in 1799, he was appointed head of the botanical gardens of Graf (Count) Razumovsky in Gorenki. He published a series cataloguing the garden's plants and other papers in botanical journals.

In 1805, soon after his appointment to the Academy of Sciences, Redowksy joined an expedition to the River Lena in Siberia, led by J.M.F. Adams. The scientific expedition accompanied a Russian embassy on its way to China, but Redowsky parted ways to explore Kamchatka. While travelling along the northern coast of the Sea of Okhotsk in 1807, he was killed, on suspicion of being a tsarist spy.

Redowksy's collections were transferred to the botanist Adelbert von Chamisso. A number of species were named in his honour, including Lappula redowskii (Hornem.) Greene, and Rhododendron redowskianum Maxim.

Sources:
G. Spasskij, 1852, Otec Zapiski, 10(8): 144-152.