Harry van Bruggen

After finishing secondary school, van Bruggen became an accountant, first in his uncle's company, later with Koninklijke Hoogovens, where he became the head of the Administration.[1] In 1950 he married Anna Blom, with whom he had a son; she died in 1996.[2] In April 2000 he remarried with Liesbeth Bakker.[1] Van Bruggen was interested in nature already at a very young age, in particular in animals and plants in and around water.[1] He sowed his first plants when he was 5-years old: Tagetes.[2] This led to his lifelong interest in botany, particularly water and marsh plants and orchids.[2] Van Bruggen was an active member of the "Dutch Waterplant Society", for which he did the administration during many years.[3]

In the late fifties, van Bruggen obtained from an aquarium-plant importer an Aponogeton species which he failed to be able to name using the existing literature. He concluded that it was a new species, unknown to science, and with the help of Hendrik de Wit he described the new species as Aponogeton rigidifolius H. Bruggen.[4] In subsequent years he published a revision of the genus Aponogeton in several parts (organised geographically), culminating in his magnum opus, a complete monograph of this genus,[5] which was well received in professional circles.[6] In total, van Bruggen described 13 new Aponogeton species.[1] For health reasons, van Bruggen never travelled to the tropics himself, but based his studies on observations from others and both living and dried (herbarium) materials sent to him.[7]

Two Aponogeton species were named after van Bruggen: A. vanbruggenii C. B. Hellquist & S. W. L. Jacobs (Australia) and A. bruggenii S. R. Yadav & R. S. Govekar (India).[2] In addition, one orchid subspecies, Ophrys holosericea (N.L. Burman) Greuter subsp. vanbruggeniana J. & L. Essink & Kreutz, was named after him, commemorating van Bruggen's lifelong interest in this family.[8]