A Botanical Heritage from the Bolus Collection

Notes

Artists: Lyn Smuts, Ellalou O'Meara, Pippa Skotnes, Jo Ractliffe and Alma Vorster.

All the botanical illustrations in this portfolio are in the Bolus Collection at the University of Cape Town. Harry Bolus was born in Nottingham, England in 1834 and died in Oxted, England in 1911. He came to South Africa in 1850 settling initially in Grahamstown and in 1855 in Graff Reinet where he took an active interest in the affairs of the community. His friend Francis Guthrie encouraged this interest in botany to help him through his bereavement when his eldest son died in 1864. In 1869 he published his first paper "Botany in South Africa" in the Cape Monthly Magazine. In December 1874 Harry Bolus moved to Cape Town and founded a stockbroking firm in partnership with his brother and became a director of the Mutual Life Assurance Society of the Cape of Good Hope and of the Colonial Orphan Chamber. His interests took him to England and Europe where he made valuable contacts with leading botanists especially at Kew. His abiding interest in Orchidaceae led him to publish

"The Orchids of the Cape Peninsula" in 1888. This was followed by a number of other botanical books. He was a founder member of the Council and later President of the South African Philosophical Society and when that society received its Royal Charter in 1908, he became the first treasurer. In 1902 he was awarded an honorary D.Sc. by the University of the Cape of Good Hope for his contribution to botany. He established a valuable collection of botanical books and a priceless herbarium. He left these to the South African College with an endowment of $27,000 for their maintenance. He wrote several major works on Cape Flowering Plants, including Ericas and helped many young people to study botany. He served on the Council of the South African College from 1886 to 1910. The Bolus Chair of Botany and the Bolus Herbarium of the South African College, later the University of Cape Town, put South Africa on the international map as a centre for botanical research and plant taxonomy.