Garden plants and their hunters – Grigorij Nikolajaevich Potanin
Is also often known as Grigory Potanin. He was born in 1835 and was a Russian explorer. Unusually, he doesn’t just have plants named after him, he is also commemorated by asteroid 9915 Potanin and the Potaninskaya Library.
Potanin attended the Page corpus in Omsk, a military school for children from wealthy families and he initially travelled to Siberia while serving with a Cossack division in the 1850s. He returned to Saint Petersburg in 1858 to study Mathematical Physics, but was arrested for his participation in student demonstrations in 1861, and expelled from the University. After spending three months in Petropavlovskaya fortress as a prisoner, he returned to Siberia. Due to his support for regionality and rights for Siberian peoples, he was arrested on charges of supporting separatism for Siberia in 1867. Convicted, he was sentenced to three years in prison and fifteen years hard labour. His hard labour was reduced to five years and in 1876, he was the leader of an expedition into Mongolia which collected various biological and plant specimens.
Potatin journeyed to northern China from 1884 to 1886 and into Japan and it is thanks to this journey that he discovered the Japanese Tree Lilac Syringa reticulate. He was arrested again in 1905 for his support of the Revolution of that year and died in 1920.
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