[5] Wigand's early education took place at home, with his father's practical pharmacological and scientific teaching being supplemented with a tutor for other more complex or esoteric subjects.

[9] To all appearances, Wigand had no botanical interests at this time, and in fact only took a single class on the subject with Georg Wilhelm Franz Wenderoth in the summer of 1843.

[12] In early 1845, Wigand took up a position working in the private laboratory of Matthias Schleiden in Jena, where he immersed himself in both botanical literature and the study of plant morphology.

Carl Vorster was a successful paper miller, and Charlotte's father, Jean François de Perrot, was a Huguenot, and a private secretary in the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia.

[19] By 1857, Wigand was the sole instructor of botany at the university, Professor Wenderoth having retired to devote his remaining years to the curation of the Alter Botanischer Garten Marburg.

[22] Wigand then spent the remainder of his career at the botanical garden rebuilding the lost collection, as well as enacting updates and changes in line with his theories about herbology and botany.

[23] By the 1870s, Wigand found himself, along with the anthropologists Rudolf Virchow and Adolf Bastian, at the forefront of the movement to defy and disprove Charles Darwin's theory of Evolution.

Wigand saw Darwinism as both "a symptom and a cause of the pervasive atheism and arrogance of this age," which was "morally sick" for "[seizing] the opportunity to eliminate God and design.

[29] From about 1873, Wigand had spent the better part of each autumn in Oberstdorf conducting personal research and preparing his writings, but on his return in October 1885, he began to feel unwell, which caused him to relinquish his teaching responsibilities through the summer of the following year.