20th-century French botanists

Édouard_Bureau

Louis Édouard Bureau (25 May 1830 in Nantes – 14 December 1918 in Paris) was a French physician and botanist.
Édouard Bureau began his medical studies in Nantes in 1848, where he held the post of director of the Muséum de Nantes (Nantes Museum). He completed his medical degree in Paris in 1852. In 1872 he obtained a post as a naturalist assistant at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (French National Museum of Natural History) in the laboratory of Adolphe Brongniart, where he replaced Edmond Tulasne. In 1874 he received appointment to the new botany post dealing with classification. Beginning in 1875, he was a director of the herbaria at the museum. He was a professor at the museum from 1874 until he retired in 1905. Adrien Franchet was his assistant in the 80's. He was succeeded by Paul Henri Lecomte.
Bureau was one of the founders of the Société botanique de France (French Botanical Society) and was the chairman in 1875, 1883, 1902 and 1905. In 1895 he was elected to the French Academy of Medicine. From 1895 to 1917, he was a member of the Comité travaux of the historiques et scientifiques (French Committee for Historical and Scientific Endeavors).
Bureau was a significant contributor to Baillon’s Dictionnaire de Botanique (Botanical Dictionary). He wrote the chapters on the Moraceae, including the Artocarpeae (the breadfruit tribe), for volume XVII (1873) of Candolle’s Prodromus systematis naturalis regni vegetabilis (A preliminary natural system for the plant kingdom). Together with Karl Moritz Schumann, he wrote the Bignoniaceae section of Volume VIII of Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius’s Flora brasiliensis (Flora of Brazil).
Bureau was particularly interested in paleobotany and significantly increased the museum's paleontological holdings. From 1910–1914 he published a two-volume work on the fossils of the Loire basin, and in 1911, he published a further work specifically on the Devonian there.The species Rhododendron bureavii, belonging to the taxonomically complex group of elepidote (nonscaly) rhododendrons, was named in his honor and was based upon specimens from China in his private collection.

Charles_Eugène_Bertrand

Charles Eugène Bertrand (2 January 1851, in Paris – 18 August 1917) was a French botanist, paleobotanist and geologist. He is remembered for his research involving the formation of coal.
He studied sciences in Paris, where he had as influences botanist Joseph Decaisne and plant physiologist Pierre Paul Deherain. In 1874 he obtained his doctorate in sciences, and was later appointed professor of botany at the University of Lille (1878). From 1881 to 1887, he was head of the Archives botaniques du nord de la France.In 1878 he became a member of the Société botanique de France. He was the father of botanist Paul Charles Édouard Bertrand (1879-1944).

Georges_Colomb

Marie-Louis-Georges Colomb (Lure, Haute-Saône, 25 May 1856 – Nyons, 3 January 1945) was a French botanist, science populariser, and a pioneer of French comics, known as bandes dessinées .
Under the pseudonym Christophe (playing on "Christophe Colomb", the French name for Columbus), Colomb created comics that were popular among the French intelligentsia, yet were published in Le Petit Français illustré, a children's paper. His popular L'idée fixe du savant Cosinus (1893–1899) featured a brilliant, absent-minded scientist. His other comics included La Famille Fenouillard (probably the first French comic, 1889); Le Sapeur Camember (1890–1896); Les Malices de Plick et Plock (1893–1904); and Le Baron de Cramoisy (1899).
Colomb's works were comic sketches exploring the quirks of his title characters. Images to him were more vital than words in communicating with children (the dialogue and Colomb's editorial remarks were always outside the picture frame). His frames have been said to anticipate the "visual grammar" of movies and television.Colomb retired as Deputy Director of the Sorbonne's botanical laboratory.
Novelist Marcel Proust was a student of Colomb in his youth, and seems to have taken an interest in botany from him—Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) presents botanical knowledge and speculation to such an extent that botany "constitutes an alternative lens through which the human world of the novel can be viewed."

Patrick_Blanc

Patrick Blanc (born June 3, 1953, Paris) is a French botanist who works at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, where he specializes in plants from tropical forests. He is the modern innovator of the green wall, specifically,
he invented the modern vertical hydroponics garden, which distinguishes it from its predecessors (aka. the Green Wall, Botanical Brick invented by Professor Stanley Hart White at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1938).
Patrick Blancs contemporary patents are responsible for modernizing and popularizing the garden type. Blanc describes his vertical garden as follows:

On a load-bearing wall or structure is placed a metal frame that supports a PVC plate 10 millimetres (0.39 in) thick, on which are stapled two layers of polyamide felt each 3 millimetres (0.12 in) thick. These layers mimic cliff-growing mosses and support the roots of many plants. A network of pipes controlled by valves provides a nutrient solution containing dissolved minerals needed for plant growth. The felt is soaked by capillary action with this nutrient solution, which flows down the wall by gravity. The roots of the plants take up the nutrients they need, and excess water is collected at the bottom of the wall by a gutter, before being re-injected into the network of pipes: the system works in a closed circuit. Plants are chosen for their ability to grow on this type of environment and depending on available light.
This system exemplifies Blanc's ideas as a scientist and also the 15th target of the Haute Qualité Environnementale ("High Quality Environment") project, although the latter gives particular stress to use of more local species, at least outdoors.
In 2009 he was awarded an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Francis_Hallé

Francis Hallé (born 15 April 1938) is a French botanist and biologist. He is a specialist on tropical rainforests and of tree architecture. He is best known for the first "Radeau des cimes" ("Navigating the peaks") he initiated with an aerostatic balloon in 1986. He is a Professor Emeritus of the University of Montpellier.In 2010, he and Luc Jacquet started to collaborate for a Wild-Touch film project, La Forêt des pluies, a documentary about primary forests.

Roger_Heim

Roger Heim (February 12, 1900 – September 17, 1979) was a French botanist specialising in mycology and tropical phytopathology. He was known for his studies describing the anatomy of the mushroom hymenium, the systematics and phylogeny of higher fungi (especially the related genera Lactarius and Russula, the Russulales and Secotium), the mycology of tropical fungi such as Termitomyces, as well as ethnomycological work on hallucinogenic fungi, like Psilocybe and Stropharia. In his career, he published over 560 articles, scientific reviews, and major works in fields like botany, chemistry, education, forestry, horticulture, liberal arts, medicine and zoology.