Hertha Ludovica Bokelmann (née Faekle) (22 August 1915

Barcelona Barcelona ( ; ; ) is a city on the northeastern coast of Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second-most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within c ...

- 10 February 2005) was a Spanish-born South African botanist and botanical illustrator. She was trained in horticulture and botany at the Technical High School in

Ulm Ulm () is the sixth-largest city of the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg, and with around 129,000 inhabitants, it is Germany's 60th-largest city. Ulm is located on the eastern edges of the Swabian Jura mountain range, on the up ...

, Germany. Arriving in South Africa in June 1937, she worked for a year at the Botanical Garden of

Stellenbosch University Stellenbosch University (SU) (, ) is a public research university situated in Stellenbosch, a town in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Stellenbosch is the oldest university in South Africa and the oldest extant university in Sub-Sahara ...

. She collected plant specimens which were passed on to the

British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...

, while some 600 specimens, mainly from the Eastern Cape and Tsitsikama, are housed at the Compton Herbarium of

Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden Kirstenbosch is a botanical garden nestled at the eastern foot of Table Mountain in Cape Town. The garden is one of 10 National Botanical Gardens covering five of South Africa's six different biomes and administered by the South African Natio ...

. Bokelmann is best known for sharing the illustrating with her cousin by marriage, Auriol Batten, of 'Wild Flowers of the Eastern Cape Province' (1966) and 'Flowering Plants of the Tsitsikama Forest and Coastal National Park' (1967). Work on the latter book resulted in a close friendship with co-author

Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer Marjorie Eileen Doris Courtenay-Latimer (24 February 190717 May 2004) was a South African museum official, who in 1938, brought the existence of the coelacanth, a fish thought to have been extinct for 65 million years, to the attention of the ...

, who had retired to a farm in the Tsitsikama and had become interested in botany.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bokelmann, Hertha Spanish botanical illustrators South African botanical illustrators 20th-century South African illustrators 20th-century Spanish illustrators 21st-century South African illustrators 21st-century Spanish illustrators 1915 births 2005 deaths 20th-century South African botanists South African women botanists Spanish expatriates in Germany Immigrants to South Africa Spanish emigrants 20th-century South African women scientists