Joachim Christian Timm, the son of
tobacconist Matthias Ernst Timm (1704–1779), was born in
Wangerin in
Farther Pomerania,
Prussia (now in
Poland) and attended school there. In 1749 he started a five-year apprenticeship as an apothecary, initially with Friedrich John in Wangerin, where he served for a year as an assistant. In the 1750s he was in
Mecklenburg, working in
Rostock. At the end of the 1750s he moved to Malchin to manage the apothecary business of Georg Heinrich Kruger and his successors. In 1760, Timm became the official apothecary of Malchin. In 1771 he was elected senator. In 1778 he became the Second or Vice-Mayor of Malchin, becoming the Mayor in 1790. The tradition of having more than one mayor to lead the town ended with his death. As an apothecary, he was interested in
botany. He enthusiastically collected plants of all kinds, especially cryptogams, primarily in the Malchin area. In 1788 he published his work
Florae megapolitanae Prodromus, which he based on the system of the Swedish botanist
Linnaeus. Professor
Johann Hedwig of Leipzig later named a genus of moss
Timmia after him, including the species he found at Malchin in Mecklenburg,
Timmia megapolitana. The epithet
megapolitania here refers to Mecklenburg, which was then often referred to by the Greek equivalent
megapolis. At the instigation of the author of a
monograph on
Timmia,
Guy Brassard, a mountain on the Arctic
Ellesmere Island was named "Mount Timmia" in honour of Timm. In 1762, Timm married Anna Christine Elisabeth Witte (1743–1792), a merchant's daughter from
Röbel. They had ten children, including the sons Joachim (1768–1801) and Hans Timm (1774–1852), who one after the other succeeded their father as the official apothecary in Malchin. Another son, Helmuth Timm (1782–1848), became a pastor in
Groß Gievitz and later in Malchin. Joachim Christian Timm died in
Malchin in 1805 and is regarded today as a pioneer of modern botany in Germany. ==References and bibliography==