Frère Sennen
# Frère Sennen

Étienne Marcellin Granié-Blanc, religious name Frère Sennen (1861–1937), was a French botanist and member (Brother) of the Catholic order Frères des écoles chrétiennes. He collected plants in France, Spain, and Morocco.

## Biography

Based for many years at the École Chrétiennes de Beziers in southern France, Frère Sennen collected a vast number of botanical specimens in the Languedoc. He published work on the flora of Beziers with Abbé Hippolyte-Jacques Coste (1858–1924). In 1894 Sennen was elected a member of the Société botanique de France. In 1904 he was appointed director of the Christian Brothers school in Figueres, Catalonia. He collected plants in the region of Ampurdan in Spain and then extended his studies to all Spain. In the early 1930s he collected plants in Morocco, especially near Melilla.

At the Instituto Botánico de Barcelona, one of the main preserved historical herbaria is that of Frère Sennen. He distributed more than 400,000 botanical specimens to the main European institutions of his time. The 10,309 specimens of the thirty series that constitute his exsiccata resp. exsiccata series "Plantes d'Espagne" were prepared and published between 1907 and 1937. The Sennen herbarium contains about eighty-five specimens. Barcelona's Colegio La Salle Bonanova [es] contains a herbarium with about 40,000 specimens collected by Sennen.

When the Spanish Revolution of 1936 began, he left Spain and settled in Marseille, dying there suddenly in January 1937.

Frère Sennen was the vice-president of the Société botanique de France, the president of the Sociedad Ibérica de Ciencias Naturales, a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona, and an honorary member of the Institució Catalana de Ciències Naturals.

