A farmer's son, he was born at Gröppendorf, in the Kingdom of Saxony, and worked as a gardener at Zeitz, Dresden, Berlin and Greifswald.
[1] In 1913, supported by the Austro-Hungarian Dendrological Society, he ventured to China to collect plants and seeds for the botanical garden at Pruhonitz.
He left China via Shanghai in 1915, travelling to Boston where he worked at the Arnold Arboretum alongside Sargent, Rehder and Wilson until 1919, when he returned to Vienna.
Impoverished by the consequences of the war, he was obliged to continue working in old age; Schneider's last book Hecken im Garten (Hedges in the Garden) was published in 1950, the year before his death in Berlin.
His brother was Karl Camillo Schneider (born 28 August 1867 in Pomßen, Germany; † March 1943 in Oleśnica, Poland), who was a German-Austrian zoologist, philosopher, writer, parapsychologist and painter.