Erik Leonard Ekman was born on October 14, 1883. Due to economic difficulties, the family moved to the central-Swedish town of
Jönköping when he was eleven and a half. Here, while at school, his passion for botanical collecting started. He was awarded a bachelor's degree in 1907 at
Lund University in southern Sweden and was offered free passage on a ship to
Argentina with a Swedish shipping company. He spent three months in
Misiones collecting plants, aided greatly by the local Swedish colony. While there, he was offered a position as the Regnellian
amanuensis at the
Swedish Museum of Natural History in
Stockholm, which he gladly accepted. He started his service at the museum in 1908. Thanks to financial support from the Regnell fund, he was able to travel widely through Europe and study with many of the prominent botanists of the time. Ekman presented his
doctoral dissertation at
Lund in 1914. In the same year, he was to participate in the third Regnellian expedition to
South America. His goal was
Brazil, but Ekman was given an assignment from professors
Ignatius Urban (from
Berlin) and
C. Lindman (from Stockholm) to make short stops on
Cuba (one month) and
Hispaniola (eight months), to collect specimens for Urban's
Symbolae Antillanae botanical project. Ekman agreed to do so, but under protest. His trip to Brazil was further delayed for two years by the onset of
World War I, political unrest in
Haiti, and a
plague epidemic in Cuba. Ekman landed in
Havana in 1914 and, except for a short visit to
Haiti during 1917, remained in
Cuba for seven years. After serious disagreements with (and pressure from) the
Swedish Royal Academy of Science in Stockholm, Ekman returned to the island of Hispaniola in 1924 and is credited with having discovered hundreds of new species during his 7-year stay there. He collected in southwestern Haiti's
Massif de la Hotte in and around present-day
Pic Macaya National Park from December 1926 to January 1927 with
Henry D. Barker, and again in September 1928. He collected in the
Massif de la Selle on several occasions in 1917 and in the 1920s. He collected primarily in Haiti from 1924 to 1928 and in the
Dominican Republic from 1928 until his death in
Santiago de los Caballeros on January 15, 1931, at the age of 46. He died from
influenza after having been battered and weakened by
pneumonia, bouts of
malaria and
black water fever. He never returned to Sweden after having left it for the second time. Ekman was interred in Santiago de los Caballeros, where a plaque was erected in his honor by the Dominican government and the American Society of Plant Taxonomists on October 14, 1950. == Legacy ==