Gunnar Seidenfaden

Gunnar Seidenfaden (1908 – February 9, 2001) was a Danish diplomat and botanist. He was Danish ambassador in Thailand 1955–1959, and in the U.S.S.R. 1959–1961. He was an expert on Southeast Asia Orchidaceae. He published several multi-volume works on orchids, e.g. ''The Orchids of Thailand – A Preliminary List'' (with T. Smitinand) and ''Orchid Genera in Thailand'' vol. I- XIV. These works are strictly taxonomic and floristic, but decorated with Seidenfaden's own drawings of flower parts as seen under the dissection microscope. His collection of more than 10,000 specimens was donated to the University of Copenhagen, together with original drawings by Katja Anker and others.

In June 2016, it was decided that the collection of orchid samples, which was held in the Danish capital botanical garden Botanisk Have, part of the natural history museum Statens Naturhistoriske Museum, would be returned to Thailand. The reason given was that many of the specimens have become quite rare and the aim is to multiply as many species as possible in sufficient scale so that young plants can be returned to their country of origin. To begin with, a first shipment of cultures of seven rare species to Queen Sirikit Botanic Garden in Chiang Mai was initiated.

Biography

Gunnar Seidenfaden studied botany in the faculty of biological sciences at the University of Copenhagen 1926–1934. He was soon involved in botanical investigations in Greenland. From 1928, he spend six summers in Greenland, partly as a manager of Lauge Koch’s Three-year Expedition to East Greenland. In ''A Geological Expedition to East Greenland 1931-1932'', which was to involve four summers and three winters there, Curt Teichert, writes that Seidenfaden, though officially "in charge of equipment" was in fact, unofficial second-in-command and it was he who took charge of everybody and everything necessary for the running of the expedition. The first trip of the Three-year Expedition sailed with the Royal Greenland Trading Department vessels Gustav Holm, named after the homonymous officer and explorer, and the Godthaab, a 287 tons displacement ship, built after a plan designed by Fridtjof Nansen, and including seaplanes borrowed from the Danish Navy. During the expedition, Eigil Nielsen, a vertebrate palaeontologist, studying the Upper Permian beds of Cape Stosch, in the fjord of Godthab Gulf in King Christian X Land, stumbled upon the first fossils of specimens of the taxon Fadenia, which he named after Seidenfaden. In 1938, Seidenfaden also joined an expedition to Spitsbergen. Unfortunately, he failed his master exam (''magisterkonferens'') in botany and turned to studies of economy and political science; graduating as Cand.polit. in 1940. He then joined the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

During WW2, Gunnar Seidenfaden became a helpful source of information to the Danish resistance organisations and in particular its illegal news sheet ''Information''. This because, first as a staff member of the Foreign ministry, and then from Sept. 1944 when he took charge of its press bureau’s newsletter (''Udenrigsministeriets Pressebureaus Situationsmelding'') - which gathered most of the news which were censured by German officials and was never printed in any of the national or even provincial press – he was able to almost “institutionalize” the co-operation between the ministry and ''Information''. Some 184 issues of the newsletter were produced in all until the end of the war, and one copy made its way to Stockholm every day on the daily German courier plane from Copenhagen, picked by insiders at Stockholm's Bromma airport and delivered to ''Dansk Presse Tjeneste'', the illegal news bureau in which Gunnar's brother Erik Seidenfaden worked. In this way, censored domestic news from Denmark was brought on air by the BBC
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