The authors

William (Bill) Liltved, born into a family of professional classical musicians, developed a passion for natural history at an early age. His enchantment with the sea and its creatures resulted in years of exhaustive research on the southern African marine Mollusca, culminating in the publication of numerous scientific papers and his monographic work, Cowries and their relatives of southern Africa (1989, 2000). Bill has worked at the South African Museum, Cape Town (1979-1984) and the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco (1985-1989). After returning to South Africa in late 1989, his interests expanded to include aspects of the Cape flora, particularly the Orchidaceae and Amaryllidaceae. Apart from the Cape orchids, Bill has extensively photographed and recorded the seasonal phases of members of the amaryllid genus Gethyllis (commonly known as ‘kukumakranka’), as well as the Stapeliae (family Apocynaceae). Bill is a research associate of the Compton Herbarium, South Africa National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), Kirstenbosch, Cape Town, and the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco. He has spent the past seventeen years researching, writing and collating documentary material for The Cape Orchids and other botanical projects.

Steven Johnson is a professor of Botany at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa and also holds the South African Research Chair in Evolutionary Biology. Prior to this he was the Smuts Fellow in Botany at the University of Cape Town. He has published extensively on the systematics, ecology and pollination biology of the Cape orchids, including over 100 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and several contributions to books, including Genera Orchidacearum and Orchids of Southern Africa. In addition, he has been a frequent contributor to botanical magazines aimed at the general public. With Dr Anton Pauw he authored the prizewinning bestseller Table Mountain: A Natural History (1999). He has received numerous accolades for his scientific work, including the SAAB medal for best Ph.D. thesis in botany (1995), the Young Scientist Award (1995), National Research Foundation's President's Award (1998) and University of Natal Vice-Chancellor's Research Award (2002). Steven has had a life-long interest in natural history and is an accomplished photographer, with his close-up images of flowers and their pollinators having appeared in many of the world's wildlife and science periodicals, including National Geographic, Natural History, Discover, BBC-Wildlife and Science News. Steven is an avid mountaineer and, in the preparation for this book, accompanied Bill Liltved on numerous expeditions in search of Cape orchids.