2. History of botanical exploration

The popular image of taxonomy is of a rather dry form of science that takes place among dusty shelves of herbarium cabinets in museums and universities. In reality, the human drama behind the discovery, description and growing of orchids is often a combination of the best (and worst) of popular fiction. Recent books including The Orchid Thief (Orlean 1998) and Orchid Fever (Hansen 2000) have transfixed readers with their gritty tales of exploration, jealousies and conflicts between taxonomists (those who describe and classify living organisms).

The collectors that stocked the herbaria of the world with specimens of Cape orchids include some of the most eccentric and colourful personalities ever to have walked the Cape mountains. The lives and exploits of some of the numerous celebrated botanists and naturalists associated with southern African orchid discovery and research, from the 17th century to the present, are recounted in separate framed biographies throughout the book. These include Alfred Bodkin, William Burchell, Johann Drège, William Harvey, Sir John Herschel, C. Louis Leipoldt, John Lindley, Peter MacOwan, Rudolph Marloth, Francis Masson, Rudolph Schlechter and Carl Thunberg.

The chapter takes form as an historical retrospective encompassing five pertinent periods in Cape botanical history.

Carl Peter Thunberg (1743-1828)	William John Burchell (1781-1863)	Sir John Frederick William Herschel (1792-1871)
William Henry Harvey (1811-1866)	Peter Macowan (1830-1909)	C. Louis Leipoldt (1880–1947)

Table Mountain and Cape Town (1772). Oil on canvas by William Hodges (1744–1797), the official artist on Captain James Cook’s second voyage (1772-1775; see J. Cook, A Voyage towards the South Pole and around the World, vol. 2, 1777). Iziko William Fehr Collection; accession no. CD 21.

The Heerenlogenment rock-shelter near Graafwater, western Cape. Those travelling northwards along the old main route from the Cape Colony, light-heartedly bestowed the name “Heerenlogenment” (Gentleman’s Lodging) upon this wild, but hospitable, resting place with its unfailing spring. Explorers and naturalists, including Carl Thunberg, Francis Masson and William Paterson, camped on the level area below the cave and among many others, inscriptions under the rock overhang of Karl Zeyher and François le Vaillant remain clearly visible and in some places overlay ochre applications of the ancient indigenous Khoe-San peoples. The gnarled wild-fig (Ficus salicifolia var. cordata), growing from an overhead rock-crevice is probably the same hoary old tree described by le Vaillant during his stop there in 1783 (see François le Vaillant–Traveller in South Africa 1: 71-73. 1973, Library of Parliament, Cape Town).

Francis Masson, the energetic gardener on the staff of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, was, in 1772, the first official plant collector to be sent abroad from England. During his travels at the Cape, Masson met an anonymous Dutch soldier, described as an “artist of great skill as a designer of the objects of natural history”. Illustrations by this soldier-artist accompany a series of articles by John Bellenden Ker that were published between 1818 and 1820 in the Quarterly Journal of Science and the Arts. These are among the first scientifically accurate published illustrations of Cape orchids.