Evgenii Wulff

Who was Evgenii Wulff?

Evgenii Vladimirovich Wulff was an Crimean botanist and plant geographer.

Wulff was born in Crimea and studied at Moscow University 1903-1906. He obtained his PhD from the University of Vienna, Austria, in 1909. He then returned to Crimea and took up a position at the famous Nikitsky Botanical Garden near Yalta. He worked there 1914-1926, undertaking studies of the vegetation and flora of Crimea and founding the multi-volume Flora Taurica. 1921-1926, he also was professor at the Tavrida University of Crimea.

He then moved to the Vavilov All-Union Institute of Crop Plants in Leningrad to expand his scientific studies. He took a particular interest in the history of plant geography. He published a monograph on this topic in 1932, which was translated to English and published in the West posthumously. This book has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's key writings in the evolution of plant geography . In 1934, he was made professor at the Pokrovsky Pedagogical Institute, where he taught botany parallel to his research at the Vavilov Institute. In 1936, he published his Historical Geography of Plants, of which an expanded version was published posthumously.