Hieronymus Harder

Jerome Harder ( * 1523 probably in Meersburg; buried on April 27, 1607 in Ulm ) was a German Latin schoolmaster and botanist.

Jerome Harder came from the area around Lake Constance and was probably born in Meersburg. Parts of his youth was spent in Bregenz, where his father worked as a teacher from 1535 onwards. 1560 Harder put in Ulm his exams for the Latin school office from and was employed in 1561 as a Latin schoolmaster in Geislingen, 1571 or 1572 Ueberkingen. From 1578 until shortly before his death, he served as preceptor of the first class of the Latin school in Ulm.

In addition to his teaching job to Harder dealt with botany and collected plants in the area of the Swabian Alb and Lake Constance. He took off in 1562 in the following decades - if known - twelve herbaria in the form of bound tome, which are among the earliest plant collections of this kind. He gave it to highly placed individuals, for example, Duke Albrecht of Bavaria, on whose financial support he needed in addition to his schoolmaster content on. The data obtained to date twelve herbarium specimens are in collections in Heidelberg, Munich ( two, one of them in the archives of the Deutsches Museum ), in the Vatican, in Salzburg, Ulm, Vienna ( 2 ), Linz, Überlingen, Zurich and Lindau. Partial Harder added missing parts of plants by colored drawings. Names were given in Latin and German, but exact references data are mostly lacking. The herbaria contain several hundred, maximum 849 plants. In addition to wild-growing flowering plants and mosses, ferns and horsetails, and crops have been reported including tomato and tobacco, which had been only a few decades previously imported from America to Germany, was added.