South African botanist. Dee Snijman was born and raised in Brakpan, a small town east of Johannesburg on the South African Highveld. She studied botany and mathematics at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, and went on to complete BSc (Hons.) and MSc degrees in Botany and to obtain a teaching diploma.
After a year as a teacher at Queensburgh Girls' High School in Durban, she moved to Cape Town in 1974 to become a botanical officer at Compton Herbarium. At Kirstenbosch she developed a particular interest in the petaloid monocotyledons that make up a large part of the Cape flora. This eventually led to further study at the University of Cape Town, under the supervision of Prof .Peter Linder, and in 1992 she gained a PhD in Botany for a thesis on the systematics of the tribe Amaryllideae (Amaryllidaceae).
Nearly all her fieldwork for the Compton Herbarium has been in the winter-rainfall region of South Africa. Most of her early collecting trips (1974-1988) were in the company of Pauline Perry, who was studying Eriospermum and Bulbinella. The appearance of two unaccompanied English-speaking women proved quite a novelty in the more remote parts of Namaqualand; a colleague who visited the area many years later reported that some Namaqualand farmers still recalled the visit by the two 'botanical ladies'. Since her friend's retirement to Wales, all her fieldwork has been done in the company of her husband, Colin Paterson-Jones (married 5 February 1988), a professional natural history photographer and writer with a special interest in southern Africa's wildflowers. This common pursuit has taken them to remote areas of southern Africa, including several visits to the Kalahari.
She counts as highlights of her botanical career those rare occasions after wildfires when she has witnessed the mass flowering of some of the Cape's ephemeral plants, whose flowers will not be seen again for another 15 to 20 years. Her collections to date have yielded approximately 2,500 plant specimens, the majority of them from the families Amaryllidaceae and Hypoxidaceae, including many new species. She also enjoys collecting the small delicate plants that are often overlooked by other collectors. The one plant that is named after her, Chamarea snijmaniae B.L. Burtt, is an obscure parsley-like plant in the family Apiaceae, which she discovered in 1983 at Nieuwoudtville, a small village in Northern Cape.
Her attraction to botany has always been linked to her interest and enjoyment of botanical art. For her revision of Haemanthus (published as a supplement in the Journal of South African Botany in 1984), she worked closely with the artist Elaphie Ward-Hilhorst, an experience that gave her insight into the art form and culminated some years later in her contribution to South African Botanical Art: Peeling back the Petals (edited by Marion Arnold, published in 2001).
Sources:
Personal communication, December 2006.
