Joseph Hers (1884–1965) was a Belgian railroad engineer who served from 1919 to 1924 as a botanist in northern China, where he discovered several new varieties of lilac.
[1] He was born in Namur, Belgium on September 6, 1884 and started working in China in 1905 as an interpreter for the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
He was far from being a desk-bound bureaucrat and clearly relished the outdoor aspect of his position, exploring and surveying the route of the railway line.
His role in the construction of the rail line certainly would have brought him into a work-related contact with William Purdom, as the Englishman was involved in re-afforestation activities in this area, as part of his work at the Xinyang forestry section.
Although Ernest Wilson is usually given the credit, it is possible that it was in fact William Purdom who initially encouraged the Belgian railway-man to contact Charles Sargent and offer his services as an amateur plant collector suggesting that he could provide plant material from areas little visited previously by Europeans.
Although he was not a trained botanist, Joseph Hers carried out this task with great enthusiasm from 1919 until 1926 gathering seeds, perhaps of as many as 400 lots, and herbarium specimens to send to the Arnold Arboretum in the USA.
From 1919–1938, he collected more than 2000 species of trees and shrubs and published papers about indigenous woody plants of Northeastern Asia.
However, he also sent material to the Musée d’Histoire naturelle de Paris and the National Botanic Garden of Belgium including rarities such as Corylus mandshurica var.