The community of nature conservationists and garden curators in Germany and beyond will be sorry to hear that Hartmut Ern (Fig. 1) passed away on 2 June 2023 at the age of eighty-seven in Berlin. From 1975 until his retirement in 1993, last as director at the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin (BGBM), he played an active role in the multifold activities of this institution. His main achievement during his time as head of the living collection was the change of the institutional accession policy from specimens of garden provenance and cultivars of unknown origin toward fully documented plants collected in the wild as far as possible.

The early years

Ern was born on 10 September 1935 in the town of Solingen (Rhine-Province of Prussia, Deutsches Reich; today Rhenish part of North Rhine-Westphalia, Federal Republic of Germany) und developed an early interest in ornithology leading to his first paper published at the age of twenty-one. He worked in this field all his life, albeit within the limits of his other professional obligations. Avifaunistic catalogues and breeding records of rare birds were later followed by papers on ethology and food ecology of birds and convergent patterns of bird behaviour in special environments following a worldwide approach. No wonder Ern started to study biology and chemistry at Freiburg University in 1955, where he joined the Badischer Landesverein für Naturkunde und Naturschutz [Baden Association for Natural History and Nature Conservation] (Fischer 1956; Sauer 1956: 435). In 1957 he moved to Vienna University in order to gain crucial knowledge of high-alpine ecology and vegetation on several extended excursions in the eastern Alps, chiefly under the guidance of Friedrich Ehrendorfer (1927–2023). Vienna's cultural life left a strong impression on Ern, who reminisced decades later about the music pieces and poems regularly broadcast on Sunday mornings under the title “Du holde Kunst”. A four-week bicycle tour brought Ern from Vienna to what are now Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in order to undertake ornithological observations (itinerary mapped in Ern 1959: 100). During a one-year stay in 1958 at the Universities of Montpellier and Toulouse (France), Ern studied with Louis Emberger (1897–1969), whose bio-geographical work was focused on the flora and vegetation of the Mediterranean basin and in particular the altitudinal zonation of the western High Atlas region in Morocco (Miège 1970). Another contact in this field was Henri Gaussen (1891–1981), who had explored the vegetation of the eastern Pyrenees and was one of the leading authorities in phytogeography and vegetation mapping (Lebrun 1982). These two academic teachers sparked Ern's interest in the horizontal and altitudinal classification of Mediterranean high-mountain systems. Six short communications on birds and one on arthropods were the outcome of his field studies in southern France including Corsica at that time.

Fig. 1.

Hartmut Ern in 1981, photographed by Eva Dieckmann.

Ern returned to Germany in 1959 and completed his studies in June 1961 with the first state exam in biology and chemistry at Bonn University, which would have enabled him to earn his money as Studienrat, i.e. a civil servant teaching in a regular, state-owned grammar school in Germany. Immediately afterward, however, Carl Troll (1899–1975), then director at the institute for geography in Bonn and President of the International Geographical Union (1960–1964), invited and accepted Ern as his doctoral student. As an influential textbook author, Troll had coined the term Landschaftsökologie [landscape ecology] and was engaged in ground-breaking comparative work on high-mountain ecology, in particular in climatology and comparative vegetation science, based on findings collected on expeditions to Andean South America, Mexico, Ethiopia and the Himalayas (Richter 2004). Financed by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst [German Academic Exchange Service], Ern embarked on a study of the three-dimensional structure of the mountain vegetation on the Iberian Peninsula in April–September 1962 and March–October 1963. Promoted Dr. rer. nat. at Bonn University in June 1965, his thesis was published the following year (Ern 1966), followed by some pertaining taxonomic novelties (Ern 1968).

In order to obtain a permanent position in the academic world, Ern decided to enrol at the Bibliothekar-Lehrinstitut [Teaching institute for librarians] in Cologne, where he finished his studies with the second state exam in March 1966. Subsequently he worked for nine years as Oberbibliotheksrat [senior scientific librarian] at the library of the newly founded University of Constance with bio- and geosciences as well as chemistry as his special fields. During this period, he published methodological hints on the procurements of scientific literature on avian biology (e.g. Berthold & al. 1974). More relevant, and also outside his administrative obligation, Ern joined the Mexico Project of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [DFG, German Research Council] (Lauer 1968–1984) in order to undertake phytogeographical fieldwork in this country in 1968 and 1971. This resulted in several papers published in 1973–1977. Along the same lines was Ern's engagement in the Sonderforschungsbereich [special research project] Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients [TAVO, Tübingen Atlas of the Near East], again financed by the DFG in 1969–1993. This led to vegetation mapping work in the Taurus mountains of Turkey. The results were published some years later (Ern 1985).

At the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem

In the early 1970s Theo Eckardt (1910–1977) had managed in a carefully staged political manoeuvre to substantially increase the number of permanent positions for scientists at BGBM. One of his recruits was Ern, aged 39, who was appointed Oberkustos [senior curator] on 1 April 1975, which meant from an administrative point of view the transfer from the Land Baden-Württemberg to the Land Berlin. At that time BGBM was, as the name implied, a botanic garden and botanical museum and comprised a rich herbarium and a substantial library, financed and supervised by the Senate of Berlin. Research was welcome, but within clearly circumscribed limits, and the focus was on the pre-existent collections. Eckhardt made sure that scientists, all at the time civil servants in permanent positions, served the institution to which they were affiliated and, at least indirectly, the public. Ern, a generalist with knowledge in vegetation science and plant geography, but neither a plant taxonomist nor a herbarium specialist, perfectly fitted Eckardt's concept for his scientific staff. Unsurprisingly, Eckardt asked Ern to supervise the library (until the first author of this obituary took over on 1 January 1976) and furthermore to become the curator for several families of flowering plants, both in the herbarium and in the living collections.

Eckardt belonged to the generation of directors who regarded his institution, among others, as an educational place where accurate information was offered to the general public. In addition, he wished his visitors to come home better informed. This resulted in each curator's obligation to offer guided tours to the botanic garden and botanical museum at regular intervals, and not general tours, but on clearly circumscribed topics to be announced well in advance. For all his years at the BGBM Ern was very active in this field and later also contributed to guidebooks for the botanic garden and the botanical museum (Ern 1987) including brochures and a miscellany of handouts for the general public. However, Ern clearly gravitated toward the living collection and therefore it was only logical that he took over responsibility from Wolfram Schultze-Motel (1934–2011; Hiepko 2011) on 1 March 1979. This arrangement was instrumented by Werner Greuter (1938–) less than one year after he had been appointed professor of botany at the Freie Universität and director of the BGBM. In the terminology of the time, this meant that Ern was one of the deputy directors reporting to Greuter. Ern's new position went with the title professor, which, however, was not associated with a teaching commitment and was not awarded by a university, but by the Land Berlin. While the denomination and circumscription of his Abteilung [division] changed over the years and later included nature conservation and public relations, Ern remained responsible for the management of this very substantial living collection. In actual fact this meant scientific supervision, while the actual care and maintenance for the living collections remained in the hands of Horst Kraft, the long-serving technical head of the botanic garden, an arrangement that did not remain free of friction.

For the following eighteen years until his retirement in 1997 Ern's focus was on implementing a fundamental shift in the accession policy of living material. Instead of acquiring specimens of garden provenance he insisted on the exclusive acquisition of fully documented specimens collected in the wild. For Ern this was not a purely administrative change, but a matter in which he invested a considerable amount of persuasion, not always appreciated by the gardeners. After all, documented provenances often meant material more difficult to cultivate and less inclined to flower, not to mention all those showy cultivars that were now blacklisted and had to be replaced. This change went hand in hand with the implementation of a proper system of nine-digit accession numbers that were consistently and persistently used in the living collections, in the Index seminum and on the labels of the pertinent specimens of the garden herbarium, which was administered by Ern's long-time assistant Susanne Schwertfeger in the most perfect way. On the positive side, provenances of higher quality for scientific research were acquired, a considerable proportion collected by Ern on excursions in several regions, e.g. in Morocco or the eastern Himalayas, during which he was usually accompanied by gardeners from the BGBM. As a consequence, the gradual replanting of different parts of “Die Pfanzengeographie” – the plant geography section in the botanic garden – was achieved following much higher standards than previously. Along similar lines was the redetermination of numerous pre-existing accessions in the botanic garden, then a routine duty to be fulfilled by the team of curators at the BGBM, and Ern also played a key role in this job. As a consequence, the Index seminum published annually by the BGBM grew in the number of items offered, in particular in collections from the wild, and their scientific quality rose to a level not achieved before. It merits comparing the Index seminum 1979 with 1504 items to the Index seminum 1997 with 3088 items, in the latter case with provenances collected in the wild on all five continents, including places like Bhutan, Costa Rica, Papua New Guinea and Zimbabwe. The critical revision of parts of the plant geography section of the botanic garden was also in Ern's agenda and resulted in careful replanting of the beds dedicated to the Iberian peninsula and the Himalayas. Ern's activities in and for the botanic garden are mirrored in several publications, focused either on individual specimens in cultivation there, e.g. of Pinus strobiformis Engelm. or Cupressus cashmeriana Royle ex Carrière, or on the basic outline of the botanic garden as set out by Adolf Engler (1844–1930; Lack 2000).

In the early seventies it was the conviction of several members of staff at the BGBM, that the institution should resume publishing Floras. Togo, a former German colony, had the advantage of being relatively poorly collected, but at the same time covered by the somewhat outdated Flora of West Tropical Africa (FWTA). Several expeditions to Togo were undertaken and considerable material brought home, collected in several sets of duplicates to balance exchange debts with other herbaria. Ern was one of the more important collectors in this country, which he visited in 1976, 1977 and 1979. However, the continuation of the Togo project was not supported by Greuter, since he rightly presumed that travel costs would be excessive and such long-term projects difficult to fund. As a consequence, what had been intended as a proper Flora ended up as a checklist with keys in French and studied specimens cited, appearing in 1985. Ern wrote an introductory chapter on the ecological zones of the country and the accounts of five families, among them Leguminosae and Umbelliferae. A somewhat bitter aftertaste seems to have remained, in particular because he and others had hoped that the Togo project would act as a starter for new Floras of parts of tropical Africa to be written in Berlin. Legumes had for long been a group of plants in which Ern took a special interest as reflected in the names Genistella sagittalis subsp. undulata Ern and Pseudovigna puerarioides Ern, the latter collected by Ern in Togo. Later he wrote the account of several smaller genera of this family, among them Chamaespartium Adans., Genista L. and Laburnum Fabr., for the European Garden Flora.

Strongly engaged in matters concerning botanic gardens in general, Ern participated in a long series of meetings on the national, European and international level and gave presentations on the collections in cultivation in Berlin. He served in various functions, among them the Chair of the European-Mediterranean Division of the International Association of Botanic Gardens (IABG) and as Secretary of the Commission for Conservation and Natural Resources of the Organization for the Phyto-Taxonomic Investigation of the Mediterranean Area (OPTIMA). Invited to speak at various meetings, ranging from “Biological aspects of rare plant conservation” in Cambridge and the International Symposium on Botanical Gardens in Nanjing to the European Workshop on Crane Protection in Stralsund, only a fraction of his presentations has ever been published. Consequently, Ern possessed extensive expertise in botanic gardens all over the world, of which he had seen many with his own eyes.

Starting with his early fieldwork in Yugoslavia, Ern maintained a special devotion to the wetlands and riparian forests of the northwestern Balkan Peninsula. He repeatedly carried out fieldwork in, and published on, the threatened ecosystems in the floodplains of the Sava River and its tributaries. Ern also made proposals on how to protect them against economic conversion and simultaneously promote gentle, ecologically compatible tourism as a means for nature conservation.

After retirement

For a variety of reasons, Ern opted for early retirement on 30 September 1997. In the following years he felt free to return to his ecological interests and applied his life-long botanical, zoological and geographical skills to nature conservation projects in the surroundings of Berlin. Together with a group of five fellow conservationists, Ern founded the Landschaftsförderverein Oberes Rhinluch [Landscape Promotion Association of the Upper Rhin Valley] in Kremmen aiming at the protection of the extensive wet meadows and waterbodies of the region as habitats of highly threatened animals and plants. The objective failed in 1997 due to lack of support from the local authorities and communities involved. Nevertheless, significant parts of this area are now protected areas under European law or national nature reserves, last not least because of Ern's repeated presentation of his project in the Berlin and Brandenburg media in 1997 and in 2001. He bought an old farmhouse in the village of Beetz near Kremmen, which he intended as place for a scientific library on nature conservation and as a location for public relations by the Association, but unfortunately he failed with this plan because of the building's unsuitable indoor conditions. Tellingly it was Sebastian Partzsch, the present Chair of the Landschaftsförderverein, who announced Ern's death in a regional daily newspaper (Anon. 2023), and this is how Ern's former colleagues at the BGBM received the news. Maybe nothing better illustrates Ern's dedication to nature conservation in his later years than a donation he made in May 2023 to the Landschaftsförderverein – a meadow situated near the village of Beetz and managed on his orders in a sustainable way with trees and bushes planted on its margins by him and his friends.

Ern was a man of many interests including music and literature, fluent in English, French and Spanish, widely travelled, well-read and the author of numerous book reviews largely published in Willdenowia. At the same time, he was a man with sometimes rough edges, occasionally rather sensitive, no diplomat, and sometimes inclined to conflicts which could easily be prevented. His knowledge of plant geography and vegetation science was broad and based on experience collected over decades in several parts of the world. He never made a big deal about private matters. This is the reason why we know nothing about his parents, childhood and youth, nor do we know his gravesite.

Biofile of Hartmut Ern

Englera 1: 47. 1979.  https://doi.org/10.2307/3776744

Publications by Hartmut Ern