Louis-Ovide Brunet was born on March 10, 1826, in Quebec City, Quebec.

He was a French-Canadian Roman Catholic priest, teacher, and botanist. He graduated from the Séminaire de Québec and was ordained in 1848. After working as a parish priest for 10 years, Brunet was offered a position as a science teacher at the Séminaire de Québec which had become Université Laval in 1852. Later he became the Chair of Natural History Dept. His numerous botanical field trips in Québec and Ontario, as well as 2 years spent in Europe visiting herbaria and attending courses given by experts at the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, provided him with basic training in botany, which was completed when he developed close contacts with Canadian and American botanists. He published his first original work in 1865. By 1870 Brunet had become an expert botanist and is considered one of the founding fathers of Canadian botany. Expected to study Canada's flora and strongly encouraged in this endeavour by the great American scholar Asa Gray, Brunet assembled an extensive set of notes which unfortunately were never published, his promising career having been cut short by illness.

He died on October 2, 1876, in Quebec City, Quebec.