Pierre Magnol

Who was Pierre Magnol?

Pierre Magnol was a French botanist. He was born in the city of Montpellier, where he lived and worked for the biggest part of his life. He eventually became Professor of Botany and Director of the Royal Botanic Garden of Montpellier and even held a seat in the Académie Royale des Sciences de Paris for a short while. Magnol is of lasting importance because he was one of the innovators of the current botanical scheme of classification. He was the first to publish the concept of plant families as we know them, a natural classification, in which groups of plants with associated common features were described.