Matthias de l'Obel

Mathias de l'Obel (1538 to 1616), also Matthaeus Lobelius, was a Flemish physician and botanist born in Lille in the County of Flanders who died at Highgate near London. He studied medicine at Leuven and at Montpellier, drawn there by the reputation of Guillaume Rondelet, whose favourite pupil he is said to have been and whose manuscripts he inherited in 1566. He practised in the Low Countries and England, including as personal physician to two monarchs, and wrote a series of major treatises on plants in Latin and Dutch as a member of the sixteenth century Flemish School of Botany. He was the first botanist to appreciate the distinction between monocotyledons and dicotyledons. The plant genus Lobelia is named after him, as is Lobel's maple.