Profile

Published a monograph on Eucommia in 1933, a foundational document of Eucommia research in the German-speaking world.

Story

Harms (1870–1942) was a core scholar of the Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Museum and Botanical Garden and a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences; the standard botanical author abbreviation 'Harms' derives from him. In 1933 he wrote a monographic paper on Eucommia comprehensively documenting this rubber tree endemic to China, which the International Dendrology Society's yearbook lists as a key document in the history of Eucommia cultivation.

Germany studied Eucommia in the 1930s to secure rubber self-sufficiency, and Harms's monograph was a product of that context; although its conclusions were not optimistic about the prospects of Eucommia rubber, the paper is the foundational work through which German-language scholarship came to know Eucommia, and it is still repeatedly cited in the European Eucommia literature.

Milestones

• 1933 Published the Eucommia monograph (Mitt. Dtsch. Dendrol. Ges. 45: 1–4)
• 1930s Germany intensively studied Eucommia as a rubber substitute, with his paper as a principal documentary basis
• Directed plant taxonomy research at the Berlin Botanical Museum for many years until his death in 1942

Key Contributions

• In 1933 published the monograph 'Zur Kenntnis von Eucommia ulmoides Oliv.' in the journal of the German Dendrological Society, systematically summarizing the morphology, distribution, and uses of Eucommia
• Long served as editor of Engler's Die natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien and Das Pflanzenreich, and was one of Europe's leading plant taxonomists of the first half of the 20th century
• His Eucommia monograph became an important reference when Germany sought rubber substitutes in the 1930s