Scion of an old aristocratic family, he was the son of Conrad Friedrich Robert Heldreich and Amalia Charlotte Humbold. He initially studied philosophy. A love of botany, however, took him to Montpellier in 1837 to study under Professor Michel Félix Dunal. He later completed his botanical education in Geneva (1838–1842). His first botanical expedition was to Sicily, after which he published his first work “Tre nuove specie di piante scoverte nella Sicilia”. From 1843 to 1848 he travelled extensively throughout Italy, Greece, Asia Minor and Crete. During 1849 and 1850 he lived in England, and then for a year in Paris where he served as curator of P. Barker Webb’s herbarium. In 1851 he settled permanently in Greece, where he carried out rigorous botanical investigations, publishing thirteen volumes of the “Herbarium Graecum Normale” between 1856 and 1896. In Greece he served as director of the court garden for over 50 years, as well as director of the natural history museum, where in addition to the department of botany he helped create departments of zoology and paleontology. Between 1880 and 1883 he taught natural history to the children of the royal family. Heldreich discovered seven new genera and 700 new species of plants, 70 of which bear his name. In 1855 Theodor von Heldreich married Sofia, daughter of I. Katakouzinos and granddaughter of Greek scholar and patriot, Konstantinos Koumas. With Sofia he had two daughters, Karolina, who married Gangolf von Kieseritzky, Curator of Antiquities at the Imperial Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and Ioanna, who married Mark Mindler, attorney and head of the stenographer’s office of the Greek Parliament. Theodor von Heldreich was a good friend of Charles Darwin.
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