Henry Frederick Conrad Sander
Henry Frederick Conrad Sander (Heinrich Friedrich Conrad Sander; 4 March 1847 in Bremen – 23 December 1920 in Bruges) was a German-born orchidologist and nurseryman who settled in St Albans, Hertfordshire, England and is noted for his monthly publication on orchids, Reichenbachia, named in honour of Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach of Hamburg, the great orchidologist.
In 1867 Sander entered the employ of James Carter & Co., a nursery at Forest Hill, meeting the Czech explorer and plant collector Benedict Roezl. Roezl had been shipping plants to England for some time, but needed a reliable agent there to manage sales, leaving him free to collect and explore. Their business association was to prove a profitable one.
Sander resigned from Carter & Co., and set up business as a seedsman in St Albans. Roezl shipped enormous consignments of orchids and tropical plants, filling a vast warehouse near the seed shop. Sander's marketing of the plants was so successful that Roezl retired in comfort to his native city of Prague.
Sander, on the other hand, got rid of the seed business and concentrated on orchids. His premises soon proved to be too small to house his enormous collections, and in 1881 he acquired 4 acres (16,000 m2) of ground in St Albans on which to build a new nursery and home. The greatly enlarged quarters and Sander's business acumen led to a thriving concern, so that up to twenty three collectors were employed to search forests and mountainous areas in Asia and South America for new species. Some sixty greenhouses accommodated the vast stock of the finest orchids to be found. Large conservatories were given over to the production of seed, and new hybrids were constantly evaluated. Sander's of St Albans handled about two million plants in the 1880s and 1890s, becoming the focus of orchid culture in Europe, where crowned heads were familiar visitors. Sander published various addenda to his Book of Hybrids, properly titled Sander's Complete List of Orchid Hybrids (St Albans 1906).
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