PlantLife Volume 55.8, July 2023. A tribute to Olive Hilliard (1925 - 2022)

 

A tribute to Olive Hilliard

by Elsa Pooley

  

I first met Olive Hilliard at the Bews Herbarium in 1967, when I was looking for someone to identify the plants from Ndumu Game Reserve on the Mozambique border, which I was painting. There were no books available for plant identification in the 1960s. When I met Olive, I was a young 19-year-old with no training but a passion for natural history and especially plants. My husband, Tony, was an excellent field naturalist and encouraged my interest in plants, especially painting them. Olive looked at my poorly pressed scraps of specimens but treated them, and me, with a professional courtesy that the specimens did not deserve! Through this a lifetime friendship was formed. 

During a visit to see her in May 2022, I asked Olive what made her take an interest in me and my very amateur efforts. She said it was a combination of my passion and good eye for a plant, as well as the fact that I was living in an area of known botanical interest where I could observe and collect plants throughout the year. In time she lent me proper plant presses, taught me how to press specimens and write up labels. She provided me with in-service training by teaching me basic taxonomy as we unpacked the presses I brought to the Bews Herbarium. She was a rigorous scientist and she advised and encouraged me to publish a checklist of the plants I had collected at Ndumu Game Reserve when living there between 1965 and 1974.

When I asked Olive to do the field guide to mountain plants of the Drakensberg and Lesotho for the Natal Flora Trust, in the late 1990s, she had already moved into other fields. She said that she and Bill would edit the book if I wrote it. In due course I emailed the draft manuscript of “Mountain Flowers, a Field Guide to the Flora of the Drakensberg and Lesotho” to the herbarium at the Royal Botanic Garden, in Edinburgh (RBGE). I received the draft back, by fax, heavily annotated and corrected. Their contribution to the book was huge, helping to highlight the field characters useful for identification. The Hilliard & Burtt notes published in the Notes from the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh were not just invaluable but essential. What a wonderful resource!

Olive was born and spent her early years on a farm in the low hills near Durban in KwaZulu-Natal in a suburb now called Hillary (her maiden name was Hillary). Olive loved the natural world as she experienced it growing up on the farm. She went to school in Durban, at the Convent of the Holy Family. Her father did not believe in university education for girls, but one of her teachers encouraged Olive in her studies and she won a scholarship to attend the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg. She was keen to study Geology, but Prof. Lester King told her that it was not a suitable career for a woman!

Olive studied botany under Prof. Adolf Bayer, completing her MSc degree on the coastal dunes at Tongaat beach in 1947. She started work at the Botanical Research Institute in Pretoria but had to resign after 14 months when she married Jack Hilliard as preference was given to men for jobs in this postwar period.

Olive and Jack went to live in Durban and built a house in the remote and undeveloped area around the Kloof Gorge. Olive loved the house and created a beautiful garden. But she wanted to work. In 1954 she was appointed as a lecturer/demonstrator for first year medical students at the non-white medical school on Salisbury Island in the Durban Harbour. She only started her professional career as a botanist in 1963 when she was appointed curator of the Bews Herbarium at the University of Natal, initially as a technician (it was a new post) and subsequently as a research fellow. She was appointed as an Associate Professor in 1981.

During the years demonstrating at the medical school, she found the time to explore the magnificent Kloof Gorge area where she lived. She found Streptocarpus on the cliffs and there was little known about them at that time. Thus started her first major botanical study. This part-time study became a serious commitment, and in 1964 it brought her to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) to meet Bill Burtt, the world expert on the family Gesneriaceae and the genus Streptocarpus. There was a conference on at the time, so they met only briefly. However, they corresponded after that, and her work interested Bill enough for him to plan a field trip to Natal. This was to be the first of many collecting trips around southern Africa, as they collaborated on the Streptocarpus studies, culminating in their book Streptocarpus: An African Plant Study (1971).

Olive and Bill in their Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh office

Their interests were wide, and in due course, they started the botanical exploration of the southern Natal Drakensberg. Bill came out each summer for about 13 years. The collecting was carefully planned, exploring a valley at a time. They carried plant presses and food and camped in cave overhangs high in the Drakensberg Mountains. Their work could not have been successful without the help of the forestry department and Bill Small and his wife Alta. They sent up pack animals with fresh plant presses and collected the full presses for the specimens to be dried over the wood stoves in use at that time.

The slim book Botany of the Southern Natal Drakensberg (1987) is a checklist of the plants they collected and identified during this period and includes an excellent description of the region and its floristics. It is hard to imagine the sheer physical hard labour that went into the hikes to the highest peaks, pressing plants under most difficult conditions, and writing up notes by torch or candlelight.

After these hectic weeks in the field, it was back to their respective workplaces, to process the plant specimens and start the identification process. This exploration produced a prodigious amount of work, many new species, including the new genus, Glumicalyx which is endemic to the Drakensberg and Lesotho.

On Olive’s retirement from Bews in 1985, she moved to Edinburgh. She had by then sold her house (she and Jack had parted some years before) and, in due course, she and Bill bought an apartment with great views over Edinburgh and a short walk to the gardens. Once they had dealt with the Drakensberg collections and the taxonomic issues that came up, Olive worked on two monographs—Manuleae and Selagineae.

Olive and Bill travelled a lot to herbaria in Europe. In her letters to me she would describe how they had also found time to hike in nearby mountains and attend classical music recitals. They shared the passion for plants, for wild places, geology, archeology, history, and poetry. 

When Bill stopped work, Olive stopped too. She felt emotionally unable to return to the gardens without Bill. Olive had worked another 20 years at the RBGE after retirement from Natal University. After Bill died, she kept herself busy gardening, reading and listening to music. She was a good letter writer and kept up a considerable correspondence.

Olive with Hilliardia zuurbergensis in 1995

According to Wikipedia, Olive “authored 372 land plant species names, the 5^th highest number of such names authored by any female scientist.” She collected about 8000 specimens, 5000 of which were collected together with Bill Burtt.

In an obituary of Bill Burtt, by Weber and Noltie in TAXON in 2008 it was stated that:

“The Hilliard & Burtt collaboration, which was in equal measure inspirational and daunting to lesser mortals, lasted over 40 years. Their first joint paper was published in 1968 and marked the start of a life-long scientific cooperation and personal friendship and finally, in 2004, to marriage. Officially, Bill Burtt retired in 1975. However, this by no means meant a cessation or retardation of work, but the start of a fresh era of work and publication. All of Burtt’s old interests were retained and published upon, but an exciting new field opened in Hilliard & Burtt’s exploration of the remarkably unknown flora of the Drakensberg Mountains in Natal and Lesotho”.

(In) “1985, Olive Hilliard retired and moved from South Africa to Edinburgh. Numerous joint publications resulted, but each also pursued their own research and publication projects. The last major joint project to be completed was a revision of the genus Agalmyla (Gesneriaceae) (Hilliard & Burtt, 2002).”

About the author:

Elsa Pooley is a landscaping and rehabilitation consultant and author of field guides to plants of KZN and the eastern region of SA. She has been studying plants in KZN since the 1960s, making herbarium collections of plants in Maputaland, and studying how they were used by the local people. In her early years she focused on painting the plants and making herbarium collections. She lived in game reserves in northern Zululand for 20 years with her husband, Tony Pooley, a crocodile specialist, and all-round naturalist, moving to the south coast at Scottburgh in 1984. In time, she researched and wrote the photographically illustrated field guides to trees, wild flowers of KZN and mountain flowers of the Drakensberg and Lesotho. Her landscaping has included Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife resorts, the Durban beachfront upgrade for the Soccer World Cup in 2010 and, currently, landscaping and rehabilitation at two retirement villages at Renishaw near Scottburgh and Widenham near Umkomaas. She leads international botanical tours to the Drakensberg and Lesotho and teaches botanical art courses in the Drakensberg.

Elsa was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the university of KZN in 2008 and she has received awards for her contribution in various fields.