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During his lifetime (1907-1999) Dr. Jany Renz worked as a director of the Basel pharmaceutical
company Sandoz (now amalgamated into Novartis), but his passion was
his research into the Orchidaceae. After his retirement in 1971 he devoted much of his time
to orchid research and curating his herbarium collection.
His publications total almost 100 taxonomic and floristic articles, and he is particularly
well-known in the field of nomenclature of European, Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern terrestrial
orchids (especially in the genera Ophrys, Orchis, Dactylorhiza and Epipactis) and for his work
on the genus Habenaria, which he was revising world-wide. He also contributed accounts of the
Orchidaceae to several regional floras, including the Flora Aegaea (1943), the
Flora Iranica (1978),
the Flora of Pakistan (1984), the Flora of Turkey (1984), the Flora of Guyana (1992),
and (posthumously) the Flora of Bhutan (2002).
His life and work has been described in an obituary
by Dr. Phillip Cribb from the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew,
and in an article by his colleague
Dr. Albert Hofmann in
Bauhinia (2000).
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Dr. Jany Renz
