Born in Johannesburg where he studied for his first degree at the University of Witwatersrand, Peter Goldblatt was a junior lecturer at the University of Cape Town (1968-1972) while working towards his doctorate in Botany and afterwards moved to the United States to work at the Missouri Botanical Garden, St Louis. His first project for the botanical garden was to study the taxonomy and drug-yielding properties of oriental poppies, which involved fieldwork in Turkey and Iran, and led to a published revision of Papaver sect. Oxytona. In 1975 he was appointed Krukoff Curator of African Botany and began a study of African Iridaceae. Since then he has collected mostly in southern Africa, but also in Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, and in 1979 made field collections in Israel, Greece and Italy for a study of Gynandriris Parl. (= Moraea Mill.). To date, he has collected some 12,600 specimens.
His research in systematics is largely directed towards revisionary and monographic work on genera of the Iridaceae. Between 1976 and 1990, he completed studies on Hesperantha Ker Gawl., Geissorhiza Ker Gawl., and several others, including Moraea, Lapeirousia Pourr., Gladiolus L., and the woody genera of Iridaceae. As Senior Curator, he has recently completed a revision of Babiana Sims with John Manning, and they are currently working on the genus Ixia L. He has also worked on the floristics of southern Africa, especially the Cape Flora, including publishing annotated catalogues of that flora with Pauline Bond (later revised and expanded in 2000 with John Manning). As a specialist in African Iridaceae he has contributed to several flora projects: Flora Zambesiaca, Flora of Tropical East Africa, Flora of Ethiopia, Flora Mesoamericana, and Flora of North America. Since 1990 much of his research has been concerned with pollination biology. Together with John Manning and Peter Bernhardt (St Louis University), he has demonstrated the existence of several pollination guilds, especially plants pollinated by long-proboscid flies and hopliine beetles, and in 2006 published with Manning a review of the pollination systems of sub-Saharan African Iridaceae. During his career he has published some 250 papers, several popular articles, and about 15 books, some on particular plant genera, and others more generally on bulbous plants, including The Complete Color Encyclopedia of Cape Bulbs (2002) with John Manning and Dee Snijman.
Sources:
Personal communication, 2006.
