The Botanical Queen: Bertha Stoneman’s South African Legacy

April 30, 1943

On this day, the botanical world lost one of its most illustrious figures when Bertha Stoneman, that remarkable American transplant who took root and flourished in African soil, breathed her last. One cannot help but wonder if the flora of South Africa dimmed ever so slightly at her passing.

Born on a humble farm near Jamestown, New York, Stoneman emerged from a family tree bearing the most extraordinary fruit. Her aunt Kate cracked the formidable barrier of the New York State bar, becoming its first woman inhabitant. Another aunt pioneered as Buffalo's inaugural policewoman, while her uncle George—after distinguishing himself as a general in that most uncivil of American wars—proceeded to govern California as its 15th steward (a position later occupied by both an actor and a bodybuilder, proving America's delightful unpredictability).

Our Bertha, not to be outdone by familial achievement, secured both undergraduate and doctorate degrees in botany from Cornell University in 1894 and 1896. When opportunity beckoned from across the Atlantic—the chance to head the botany department at Huguenot College, the sole women's institution on the entire African continent—she leapt with both feet and never looked back.

"It was the courtesy, culture and hospitality of certain Africans that held me... there."

Held, indeed! The college promptly assigned her not merely botany, but zoology, mathematics, logic, ethics, and psychology. One imagines her predecessors might have added blacksmithing and celestial navigation had they thought of it.

Stoneman's textbook, Plants and their Ways in South Africa, published in 1906, became the horticultural bible for generations of South African students. Surrounded by exotic flora that would make any botanist's heart flutter wildly, she built a herbarium for Huguenot, either collecting specimens herself or dispatching others to do her bidding—rather like a general commanding botanical troops.

During visits to her homeland, Stoneman extolled South African plant life with evangelical fervor:

"South Africa provides 42 species of native asparagus. Why should it not be cultivated as a vegetable?
...There are fine citrus fruits, avocado, pears, figs, mangoes, and paw-paws...
You need not seek employment.
Employ yourself.
Come soon, and you will be warmly and courteously welcomed."

One can almost picture her, hands animated, eyes alight, attempting to lure unsuspecting Americans into her botanical paradise. How many packed their bags, we shall never know.

As a teacher, Stoneman possessed that rarest of gifts—the ability to ignite passion for her subject in the most reluctant of students. Carolize Jansen lamented in her blog:

"If Bertha Stoneman were my biology teacher at school,
maybe I would've considered choosing the subject for the final three years.

In the opening chapter of Plants and their ways in South Africa, a 1906 textbook for school biology, her introduction ranges from the baking of bread to the Wonderboom in Pretoria, with a final encouragement regarding Latin names:

''...the reader may skip any name in this book longer than Hermanuspetrusfontein."

Stoneman was good at many endeavors. Her Cornell Delta Gamma biography noted,

"She entered with enthusiasm into all phases of [college] life, seeming equally at home on the hockey-field, as captain of a team, or in dramatics, writing, and coaching plays... We... are not surprised to learn that she has written many a song for Huguenot College, including its "Alma Mater."

Indeed, our Bertha possessed talents as varied as the species in her herbarium. She penned Huguenot's "Alma Mater," a composition that surely rang through the halls with stately reverence, invoking wisdom, brilliance, and queenly serenity. One imagines generations of young women standing straighter at its opening notes.

Among Stoneman's academic offspring were botanical illustrator Olive Coates Palgrave, whose 1956 work Trees of Central Africa brought the continent's arboreal wonders to life, and the distinguished mycologist and bacteriologist Ethel Doidge. One suspects Stoneman viewed these accomplished women with the same pride a gardener reserves for her most spectacular blooms.

After twenty-four years of cultivating young minds in South African soil, Stoneman ascended to the presidency of Huguenot University College, a position she held for twelve years before retiring. Upon her death, she requested her ashes be returned to American soil—a botanical specimen completing its life cycle in its native habitat.

In Stoneman's botanical universe, everything had its season—even the most extraordinary of lives.