The botanist from Belvidere: the living legacy of Augusta Vera Duthie (1881-1963)

Here we review the life, career, botanical contribution and legacy of the founder of the Botany department at Stellenbosch University, Augusta Vera Duthie. We briefly introduce her, outline her background and personal life, as best as could be reconstructed from the few available publications and documents on her life. We then shift our focus to her long, often uphill, yet most impressive establishment and development of the Botany department at Victoria College (which later became Stellenbosch University). All attempts were made to highlight innovative initiatives she embarked upon to secure funding to grow the department, to the extent that she eventually managed to found the Stellenbosch University Herbarium and its associated library, the Stellenbosch University Botanical Gardens, and ultimately a fully functional Botany department, complete with lecturing facilities and laboratories. Reconstructing this chapter of her life relied heavily on a treasure trove of documents and letters held in the Stellenbosch University Library's Special Collections. The paper next briefly reviews her botanical contribution, focussing particularly on her work on the lowland flora of Stellenbosch. Again, documents, letters and photographs held in the Special Collection and Stellenbosch University Archives help illuminate her contributions as a botanist. We conclude by reviewing the different components of her rich legacy, and how most of these initiatives are being maintained to this day. Here we place a fairly strong emphasis on the Duthie reserve, and the ongoing conservation efforts to conserve this precious fragment of veld, the last remaining home to the critically endangered Haemanthus pumilio.