Alexander von Humboldt and the beginnings of plant geography
21 March 2019
Photo: Scan Herbarbogen: Herbarium, Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin
Spathodea laurifolia Kunth, a trumpet tree plant collected by Humboldt and his companion Bonpland in Venezuela.
With his "Natural Painting of the Andes," Alexander von Humboldt popularized plant geography. How do we read this epochal depiction today, which is reminiscent of a modern infographic? What role does it play in the exhibition? The scientific advisors of the special exhibition "Humboldt Lives!" in the Botanic Garden and the Loki Schmidt House classify Humboldt's insights for botany and tell what visitors can expect.
How can we read Humboldt's "Nature Painting of the Andes" today? Why is it so significant?
Petra Schwarz:
In "Naturgemälde der Anden," Alexander von Humboldt combines perspectives from art and science. He combines botanical, topographical and climatic data in a common form of representation. He succeeds in making these different factors clear in their interconnectedness.
Even 200 years after its creation, this nature painting has lost nothing of its captivating and impressive nature. As the eye, caught by the overall impression, switches between pictorial and textual elements, it is possible to grasp climatic and vegetation stages as well as the distribution of plant species. Here, in an exemplary manner, the results of precise observation and measurement, careful collection and documentation, as well as coherent thinking and evaluation, culminate in an expressive visualization.
I would like to encourage you to deal analytically with this kind of representation. We can take many a hint from it as to how research results of a complex nature, for example on climate change, can be communicated today in an appealing and intuitively readable form.
What do we learn about Humboldt's plant research at the Loki Schmidt House?
Petra Schwarz:
In the Loki Schmidt Haus, two large-scale wall installations reveal the dimensions of Humboldt's research.
Humboldt published 1,260 illustrations of individual plants in his botanical works. A unique montage illustrates how Humboldt integrated the plants he and his collaborators documented into the system of nature founded by Carl von Linné. The oversized "Nature Painting of the Andes" impressively visualizes Humboldt's step towards the "Geography of Plants". Ethical questions of botanical research and consequences of the application of such knowledge up to our days are also addressed in the exhibition.
How do you assess Humboldt's research achievements for botany? To what extent did Humboldt inspire other research disciplines?
Matthias Schultz:
Humboldt's achievements for botany as a whole cannot be underestimated at all. We owe the first description and categorization of the so rich plant world of the Neotropics from the rainforest to the Andes to his powers of observation and his meticulous collecting activities. This achievement is on a par with his merits for plant geography. Yes, both fields are closely related to each other. For the scientifically exact description and systematization of species always includes the species-specific characteristics as an expression and result of adaptation to environmental conditions and their change in the course of evolutionary time.
Humboldt not only researched and published himself, he was also a very skillful organizer. For example, he was able to enlist scientists from different disciplines to work on the many parts of one of his major works, the "Journey to the Equinoctial Regions." Among them was, of course, his travel companion, the botanist Bonpland, but also Carl Sigismund Kunth, who after Willdenow's early death took over most of the editing of the many plants collected, or the English botanist Sir William Jackson Hooker, who revised the Lower Plants. In addition, there were zoologists, physicists and astronomers, chemists and mathematicians such as Cuvier, Latraille, Gay-Lussac, Arago, to name but a few. Humboldt thus organized a network for the scientific evaluation of the collection objects, observations and measurements he and Bonpland had gathered. His approach was new in this breadth but also necessary to meet his own demand for a comprehensive view of the things of nature. Today, cooperation and interdisciplinarity are among the basic principles in science and thus also part of Humboldt's legacy.
In total, Humboldt and his companion Bonpland collected over 6,000 plants in South America. What became of them, what do we see of them in the exhibition?
Matthias Schultz:
To this day, the plants collected by Humboldt and Bonpland are in roughly equal parts in the herbarium of the Natural History Museum in Paris and in the herbarium of the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum in Berlin-Dahlem. Many of the dried plants are so-called type specimens, i.e. they are the objects according to which new plant species were first scientifically described. For taxonomic research and for the stability of scientific plant naming, these type specimens are still of the greatest value today. In the exhibition we see two such herbarium specimens, collected by Humboldt and Bonpland in 1799 in the forests around Cumana in northern Venezuela. Both specimens were kindly provided by the colleagues of the Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum in Berlin-Dahlem. There the herbarium of Carl Ludwig Willdenow is kept. He was director of the Botanical Garden in Berlin and one of the most respected botanists of his time. Humboldt had befriended Willdenow and became his student. And so it was Willdenow who, at Humboldt's request, took on the monumental task of examining the herbarium material brought from America. When Willdenow fell ill in 1811 and had to return to Berlin from Paris, he also brought the plants we have shown.
What awaits us in the Botanical Garden? What are the highlights of the exhibition?
Stefan Rust:
Along a "Humboldt Trail" in the Botanic Garden's open-air grounds, we provide insights into important "stations" in Alexander von Humboldt's scientific life. At each of the chronologically arranged stations, visitors will learn what drove Humboldt and in what "environment" he moved.
Immediately after entering the open-air grounds, a first station describes Humboldt's wanderlust and invites visitors to accompany Humboldt on his journey and through his life, beginning with his travel preparations in Europe and then ... - But come to the Botanical Garden yourself and follow the Humboldt Trail through bamboo groves and attractively designed flower beds to the Loki Schmidt House. Protected from wind and weather, it offers the opportunity to unfold a whole fan of the fascinatingly diverse life of the last polymath.
So how do you get "botany in motion"?
Stefan Rust:
For us, the question is not so much how to get botany moving, because Alexander von Humboldt already did that for us by expanding and changing the way the natural sciences look at the world in his brilliant way. It must be remembered that he lived in a time when famous contemporaries brought a new order to biology, such as Carl von Linné with the introduction of a worldwide uniform scientific naming of all living things, or fundamentally shook the previous world view even far beyond the boundaries of biology, such as Charles Darwin with his theory of evolution.
But to come back to your question again in the literal sense: By embedding Alexander von Humboldt's stations in the plants in the Botanic Garden's outdoor area, visitors "have" to move through the world of plants - just as Humboldt did on his travels. And depending on the weather, wind, rain, and hopefully a lot of sun will additionally get the botany moving.
Dr. Petra Schwarz: Loki Schmidt Hauses
Dr. Matthias Schultz: Herbarium Hamburgense
Stefan Rust: Loki-Schmidt-Gartens / Botanischer Garten der Universität Hamburg
More about the special exhibition "Humboldt Lives!": https://www.cenak.uni-hamburg.de/ausstellungen/sonderausstellungen.html