Olof Swartz

Olof Peter Swartz (21 September 1760 – 19 September 1818) was a Swedish botanist and taxonomist. He is best known for his taxonomic work and studies into pteridophytes, but also studied orchids, mosses and lichens.

Biography Olof Swartz attended the University of Uppsala where he studied under Carl Linnaeus the Younger (1741–1783) and received his doctorate in 1781. He first traveled in 1780 to Lapland in the company of several other botanists.

In 1783 he sailed for North America and the West Indies, primarily in the area of Jamaica and Hispaniola, to collect botanical specimens. His botanical collection, of an impressive 6000 specimens, is now held by the Swedish Museum of Natural History, as part of the Regnellian herbarium.

By 1786 he left for London to prepare his collection. There he met naturalist Joseph Banks (1743–1820), who was impressed with his knowledge of Botany. He was offered a position with the British East India Company as a travelling physician, but turned it down, and returned to Sweden in 1787. Ten years later he proposed to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (of which he became a member in 1789) the idea of a permanent travel grant, based on the methods he had seen employed by Joseph Banks within the British Empire. In 1791 he became Professor Bergianus at the Academy of Sciences at Stockholm. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1805. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1806.

Swartz was the first specialist of orchid taxonomy, who published a critical review of orchid literature and classified the 25 genera that he recognized through his work. He was also the first to realize that most orchids have one stamen, while slipper orchids have two.

Lichenology Although Swartz is best known for his work on flowering plants and ferns, he began his career with a serious interest in lichens and mosses, which he made the subject of his medical dissertation at Uppsala University. In Methodus muscorum illustrata (1781) he discussed eleven lichens and described five as new, using the broad Linnaean genus Lichen (a convention he largely kept in later writings). The dissertation also included his account of Lichen filix, based on material in Carl Peter Thunberg's herbarium, which has been treated as the first lichen formally described from New Zealand and the Southern Hemisphere. In modern author citations his abbreviation "Sw." remains familiar to lichenologists through species such as Thamnolia vermicularis and Ochrolechia frigida.

Swartz's later lichen work was strongly shaped by his overseas collecting, especially in Jamaica (1783–1786), where he gathered a substantial number of lichens alongside other plant groups. His published lichen studies fall into two early Swedish contributions (1781, 1784) and three New World treatments (1788, 1806, 1811). While working in London on his West Indian collections, he prepared Nova genera et species plantarum seu Prodromus (1788), which introduced 20 Jamaican lichens with brief Latin and localities; in keeping with Linnaean practice he placed most in Lichen (with a few assigned elsewhere) and treated lichens within the "algae" section of cryptogams. He later expanded this material in volume 3 of Flora Indiae occidentalis (1806), supplying fuller descriptions and habitat notes, and in Lichenes Americani (1811), which treated 25 species (mainly Jamaican, with a few from the eastern United States) and included detailed hand-coloured illustrations. Across his five main lichen accounts (1781–1811) Swartz described 37 new species, of which 27 names remain in use as basionyms of accepted taxa.

Selected works Nova genera et species plantarum seu prodromus, 1788 Observationes botanicae, 1791 Icones plantarum incognitarum, illustrating the rare plants of the West Indies (Upsala, 1794-1800) Flora Indiae occidentalis, (3 vols., 1797-1806) Synopsis Filicum, 1806 Lichenes Americani (Nuremberg, 1811) Summa vegetabilium Scandinaviae, 1814