Philipp Wilhelm Wirtgen (4 December 1806 – 7 September 1870) was a German botanist and teacher born in Neuwied, Germany. He was the father of botanist Ferdinand Paul Wirtgen (1848–1924).
Neuwied is a town in the north of the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, capital of the District of Neuwied. Neuwied lies on the east bank of the Rhine, 12 km northwest of Koblenz, on the railway from Frankfurt am Main to Cologne. The town has 13 suburban administrative districts: Heimbach-Weis, Gladbach, Engers, Oberbieber, Niederbieber, Torney, Segendorf, Altwied, Block, Irlich, Feldkirchen, Heddesdorf and Rodenbach. The largest is Heimbach-Weis, with approximately 8000 inhabitants.
Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central and Western Europe, lying between the Baltic and North Seas to the north, and the Alps, Lake Constance and the High Rhine to the south. It borders Denmark to the north, Poland and the Czech Republic to the east, Austria and Switzerland to the south, France to the southwest, and Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands to the west.
Ferdinand Paul Wirtgen was a German pharmacist and botanist. He was the son of botanist Philipp Wilhelm Wirtgen (1806–1870).
He was a school teacher in Remagen, Winningen and beginning in 1831, at Koblenz, where from 1835 to 1870, he served as an instructor at the Evangelischen Höheren Stadtschule. [1] With botanist Theodor Friedrich Ludwig Nees von Esenbeck (1787-1837), he was founder of the Botanischer Verein am Mittel- und Niederrhein (Botanical Association of the Middle and Lower Rhine).
Remagen is a town in Germany in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, in the district of Ahrweiler. It is about a one-hour drive from Cologne, just south of Bonn, the former West German capital. It is situated on the left (western) bank of the river Rhine. There is a ferry across the Rhine from Remagen every 10–15 minutes in the summer. Remagen has many beautiful and well-maintained buildings, churches, castles and monuments. It also has a sizeable pedestrian zone with plenty of shops.
Winningen is a municipality in the district of Mayen-Koblenz in Rhineland-Palatinate, western Germany.
Koblenz, spelled Coblenz before 1926, is a German city situated on both banks of the Rhine where it is joined by the Moselle.
Wirtgen specialized in the study of Rhineland flora, and his work largely dealt with phytogeography, taxonomy and floristics within the field of botany. Among his numerous publications was an 1857 book involving flora native to Rhine Province called "Flora der preußischen Rheinprovinz und der zunächst angränzenden Gegenden", and a treatise titled "Neuwied und seine Umgebung" (Neuwied and its Environment). Other noted works by Wirtgen include:
The Rhineland is the name used for a loosely defined area of Western Germany along the Rhine, chiefly its middle section.
Phytogeography or botanical geography is the branch of biogeography that is concerned with the geographic distribution of plant species and their influence on the earth's surface. Phytogeography is concerned with all aspects of plant distribution, from the controls on the distribution of individual species ranges to the factors that govern the composition of entire communities and floras. Geobotany, by contrast, focuses on the geographic space's influence on plants.
In biology, taxonomy is the science of defining and naming groups of biological organisms on the basis of shared characteristics. Organisms are grouped together into taxa and these groups are given a taxonomic rank; groups of a given rank can be aggregated to form a super-group of higher rank, thus creating a taxonomic hierarchy. The principal ranks in modern use are domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus is regarded as the founder of the current system of taxonomy, as he developed a system known as Linnaean taxonomy for categorizing organisms and binomial nomenclature for naming organisms.
- Flora des Regierungsbezirks Coblenz, 1841 – Flora of the Koblenz district.
- Die cryptogamischen Gefässpflanzen der preussischen Rheinlande, 1847 – Cryptogamic vascular plants of the Prussian Rhineland.
- Beiträge zur rheinischen Flora, 1869 – Contribution to Rhenish flora. [2]
A cryptogam is a plant that reproduces by spores, without flowers or seeds. "Cryptogamae" means "hidden reproduction", referring to the fact that no seed is produced, thus cryptogams represent the non-seed bearing plants. Other names, such as "thallophytes", "lower plants", and "spore plants" are also occasionally used. As a group, Cryptogamae are the opposite of the Phanerogamae or Spermatophyta, the seed plants. The best-known groups of cryptogams are algae, lichens, mosses and ferns, but it also includes non-photosynthetic organisms traditionally classified as plants, such as fungi, slime molds, and bacteria.The classification is now deprecated in Linnaean taxonomy.
The plant genus Wirtgenia (family Asteraceae) was named in his honor by Carl Heinrich 'Bipontinus' Schultz (1842). [1] [3]
A genus is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms, as well as viruses, in biology. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial nomenclature, the genus name forms the first part of the binomial species name for each species within the genus.
Asteraceae or Compositae is a very large and widespread family of flowering plants (Angiospermae).
Carl Heinrich Schultz was a German physician and botanist, and a brother to botanist Friedrich Wilhelm Schultz (1804–1876).
