Camillo Karl Schneider

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Camillo Karl Schneider (7 April 1876 – 5 January 1951) was a German botanist, landscape architect, writer and plant collector. He was born in Gröppendorf, Saxony, on a farm and started his career as a gardener in Zeitz, Dresden, Berlin and Greifswald. He then worked in Berlin’s City Parks Department and helped edit the gardening magazine Gartenwelt, which led to landscape work in Darmstadt and Berlin.

In 1900 he moved to Vienna to work as a freelance architect and writer, traveling around Europe. He published his first books in 1904, including the Illustrated Handbook of Broad-leaved Trees, completed in 1912. A major Berberis study manuscript was destroyed in a 1943 bombing raid in Berlin. In 1907 he created the Plantae hungaricae series.

In 1913, with support from the Austro-Hungarian Dendrological Society, he went to China to collect plants for the Průhonice garden. He left China in 1915, going to Boston to work at the Arnold Arboretum with Sargent, Rehder and Wilson until 1919, then returned to Vienna. Two years later he moved to Berlin to work on the periodical Gartenschönheit, which lasted until 1942, after which he worked for Gartenbau im Reich while continuing to design gardens.

After World War II he faced financial hardship but continued working. His last book, Hecken im Garten (Hedges in the Garden), was published in 1950. He died in Berlin in 1951. His brother, Karl Camillo Schneider (1867–1943), was a zoologist, philosopher, writer and painter who corresponded with Einstein.