Simon Schwendener

Who was Simon Schwendener?

Simon Schwendener was a Swiss botanist who was a native of Buchs in the Canton of St. Gallen.

In 1856 he received his doctorate at the University of Zurich, where afterwards he was an assistant to Carl Wilhelm von Nägeli. In 1860 he became a professor of botany at the University of Munich, and in 1867 a professor of botany and director of the Botanical Gardens in Basel. In 1877 he succeeded Wilhelm Hofmeister as professor of botany at the University of Tübingen, and from 1878 until his retirement in 1910, Schwendener was a professor at the University of Berlin.

Simon Schwendener is remembered for his investigations of plant anatomy and physiology, being interested in the inter-relationship between a plant's construction and its functionality. He took a mechanistic approach to his botanical studies, believing that a plant's anatomical structure conformed to principles of mechanics. He conducted extensive research on the mechanics of sap ascent, the construction of a leaf's pulvinus, the positioning of a plants' leaves, and the inner-workings between stomata and its guard cells.