Camillo Karl Schneider was a German botanist and landscape architect. A farmer's son, he was born at Gröppendorf, in the Kingdom of Saxony, and worked as a gardener at Zeitz, Dresden, Berlin and Greifswald. Returning to Berlin to work in the City Parks Department, he assisted in editorial work for the periodical Gartenwelt, which led to his employ as a landscape assistant in Darmstadt and Berlin. In 1900, he moved to Vienna, where he practiced as a freelance architect and writer, travelling extensively through Europe. In 1904 he published his first books, including the beginning of his tome Illustrated Handbook of Broad-leaved Trees, which he completed in 1912. However, the manuscript of what should have been his magnum opus, a study of the genus Berberis, was destroyed in a bombing raid on Berlin in 1943.
In 1913, supported by the Austro-Hungarian Dendrological Society, he ventured to China to collect plants and seeds for the botanical garden at Pruhonitz. He left China via Shanghai in 1915, travelling to Boston where he worked at the Arnold Arboretum alongside Sargent, Rehder and Wilson until 1919, when he returned to Vienna.