John Nietner born Johannes Werner Theodor Nietner (19 May 1828 - 21 February 1874) was a Prussian-born naturalist chiefly interested in botany and entomology. Born in Potsdam, he became a naturalized British citizen and owned a coffee plantation in Ceylon. During his stay in Ceylon from 1851 to 1874 he collected and described numerous insect species from the island. He also sent specimens for study by experts in Europe and many species such as Cethosia nietneri were named after him by others. Interested in insect pests, he wrote a booklet on the pests of coffee in 1861. Biography Johannes was born in Paretz, near Potsdam where his father Theodor Eduard Nietner (1790-1871) and mother Charlotte Louise Albertine or Bertha née Sello (1802-1835) belonged to court-gardener families. Theodor worked from 1822 as head gardener in the court of Queen Louise and Friedrich Wilhelm III. Bertha belonged to the court-gardener family of Sello and two of her brothers worked in the gardens at Sanssouci. In 1832 the family moved to Niederschönhausen which was the summer home of Queen Elisabeth Christine. Bertha died in 1835 after the birth of a son. Johannes studied at the Berlin Gymnasium. Travel and exploration was in the family, Friedrich Sello, a maternal cousin, explored Brazil. Johannes' brothers Theodor, Louis, and Paul became gardeners in the family tradition. Louis moved to Java in 1848 to work as a gardener in the Dutch East India Company and died there in June the next year. A footnote by Johannes' father to a note by the son states that an opportunity in Ceylon came up after a visit to Dr John Lindley at his garden in Chiswick near London. Lindley suggested a place in Ceylon where Nietner could work and this may possibly have been an estate belonging to the Berlin banker Ferdinand Moritz Delmar (1781-1858). Nietner set off to Ceylon in spring 1851 via Alexandria and Suez to take up the position. He was in close contact with G.H.K. Thwaites, the director of the Peradeniya Botanical Garden. A letter to the Berlin Entomological Journal of 1857 informed entomologists interested in specimen collections from Ceylon to reach him through his father, Hofgärtner Nietner at Niederschönhausen at Berlin. His collections from Ceylon, including those that were sent to European collaborators (the most prominent being Carl August Dohrn, Victor Motschulsky, Hermann August Hagen, Hermann Loew and Gustav A. Kraatz) are now found at