Jumping Through Windows: The Extraordinary Life of South Africa’s Great Plant Collector Elsie Elizabeth Esterhuysen

April 11, 1912

On this day, the botanical world received a gift it scarcely deserved—the birth of Elsie Elizabeth Esterhuysen, a South African treasure who would go on to become what modest society might call "the most outstanding collector ever of South African Flora."

Modest society would be correct, for once.

Dear gardeners, while you fuss over your garden beds and pride yourselves on identifying a dozen varieties of roses, this remarkable woman collected an astonishing 36,000 herbarium species. Yes, you read that correctly—thirty-six thousand. One imagines her home must have resembled a jungle more than a dwelling.

As a botanist at the Bolus Herbarium in Cape Town, our Elsie possessed a humility so profound it bordered on the perverse. She steadfastly refused to publish her extraordinary work under her own name—a peculiar decision that would send today's credit-seeking academics into apoplectic fits!

Nevertheless, nature has its way of acknowledging greatness even when the great refuse to acknowledge themselves. There are now 56 species and two entire genera named after her. The adage that "If you want to be immortal, collect good herbarium specimens" has never found a more perfect embodiment than in our Elsie Esterhuysen's botanical legacy.

When she finally departed this mortal realm of soil and seed, over 200 people gathered at her memorial—a testament to the fact that even the quietest among us can leave the loudest impressions. Her botanical family offered three tributes, which this chronicler finds most illuminating about the character of this plant-obsessed woman.

Botanist John Rourke recalled:

"Elsie returned to Cape Town in 1938. It was here that her real career began when she joined the Bolus Herbarium (Figure 2) under another formidable woman - Dr Louisa Bolus. [...] It's an astonishing fact that for the first 18 years of her employment she received no proper salary and was paid out of petty cash at a rate not much better than a laborer.

She did not collect randomly; Elsie was above all an intelligent collector, seeking range extensions, local variants, or even new species, filling voids in the Bolus Herbarium's records, often returning months later to collect seeds or fruits that were of diagnostic importance. [...] Always self deprecating, one of her favorite comments was 'I'm only filling in gaps'."

Imagine, dear gardeners, working for eighteen years without proper compensation! While modern botanists demand grants, equipment, and recognition, Elsie was quietly revolutionizing South African botany for pocket change and the sheer love of plants. One wonders if the Bolus Herbarium has since erected a statue in penance—though she would undoubtedly have disapproved of such vanity.

Botanist Peter Linder offered this delightful remembrance:

"She was what I thought a botanist was supposed to be. She was in the mountains every weekend, and came back with big black plastic bags full of plants, that she sorted and passed to Gert Syster to press. She was the one person who could put names on plants that defeated my attempts. And she had little time for academic niceties—for her the important things were plants in the mountains, their welfare, their relationships. She was immersed in plants and mountains."

"Elsie taught me that each species has an essence, a character—that it liked some habitats but not others and that it flowered at a particular time. She was curious about the plants, not because they informed her about some theory or other, but she was interested in the plants themselves—she cared about them."

What a revelation! A botanist who actually cared about plants rather than papers and citations! One can almost picture her tramping through the mountains, those infamous black plastic bags swinging, her eyes alight with the thrill of discovery while lesser botanists huffed and puffed in her wake.

Botanist Ted Oliver shared this particularly revealing anecdote:

"Her mode of transport was the bicycle (we have her latest model here today). She rode to the University of Cape Town up that dreadful steep road every day for a lifetime, come sunshine or rain, heat or cold. Now one knows why she was so fit and could outstrip any poor unsuspecting younger botanist in the mountains! Every day she would come up and park her bicycle behind the Bolus Herbarium building and then often jump through the window in the preparation section rather than walk all the way around to the front door."

Can you envision it, dear readers?

This botanical goddess cycling up steep hills daily, then leaping through windows rather than taking the civilized route through a door! While today's researchers demand parking spaces and elevator access, Elsie was building calf muscles that could shame an Olympic athlete. No wonder the younger botanists found themselves gasping in her dust on mountain expeditions.

Most deliciously revealing was a newspaper clipping discovered among her personal effects after her death—a side of Elsie that had remained as hidden as a rare orchid in a remote crevice. This undated piece from the Kimberley newspaper reported on a Reading about the life and works of Franz Schubert at a meeting of the Kimberley Philharmonic Society. It was Miss E. Esterhuysen who delivered the lecture, preceded by another on Burchell's travels in South Africa during Schubert's time. The evening concluded with "a delightful short program of the composer's music played as piano solos by Miss Esterhuysen."

So our plant-collecting genius was also a musical scholar and pianist! One wonders if her fingers, so adept at pressing piano keys, were equally nimble when pressing plant specimens. Perhaps she hummed Schubert while collecting in the mountains, serenading the very flora that would later immortalize her name.