South African botanist. Sarie Perold was born in Johannesburg and majored in human anatomy and histology at the University of Witwatersrand. After graduating with a BSc in 1950, she worked for six years as a technician at the South African Institute for Medical Research and for a private firm of pathologists. This was followed by 11 years as a research assistant at the University of Witwatersrand in the Department of Chemical Pathology under Prof Hymie Stein, during which she co-authored six papers.
In 1953 she married the filmmaker Jan Perold, director of Die Ruiter in die Nag (1963). They moved to Pretoria in 1968, a year after the birth their only child, Jan. She returned to work in 1976 as part-time biology teacher, having completed second-year university courses in botany and zoology. Three years later she joined the Botanical Research Institute as a part-time technical assistant to Dr Robert Magill, who was undertaking a revision of South African mosses, which had not been studied since Sim's The Bryophyta of South Africa (1926). When Professor O.H. Volk visited the herbarium in 1981, he suggested to Dr Magill that someone on the staff should be studying the liverworts in the collection. This task was given to Perold who, in spite of the relatively late age at which she began her study of this group, subsequently co-authored 13 published papers with Prof Volk and earned MSc (1990) and PhD (1992) degrees for her work from the University of Pretoria. Since then she has published more than 90 papers, mostly as sole author, including Fascicle 1: Marchantiidae, Part 1: Marchantiide for the Flora of southern Africa (1999). Several papers on the Metzgeriales (especially Fossombroniaceae) were also published, but only one on a leafy liverwort.
Dr Perold has collected mainly in Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Drakensberg, Lesotho, Namaqualand and southwestern Cape including a small collection made in Malawi in 1991. Her work has focused on the Marchantiidae, of which the Ricciaceae have been of particular interest, 26 new species having been described. A memorable occasion from a collecting expedition occurred when she met up with Prof Jeffrey Duckett and his team at a pre-arranged site near the New Oxbow Lodge in the northern part of Lesotho in April 1994. This was her second attempt at finding more material of a new Cryptomitrium species to augment the scanty material collected seven years earlier by her colleague, Jacques van Rooy. On this occasion, Jeffrey Duckett found thalli growing in ample amounts under a large boulder. His find enabled Dr Pernod to describe C. oreades Perold, only the third species in the genus to be described worldwide, and which so far as is known occurs only in Lesotho. Although she retired in 1993, Dr Perold continues to work at SANBI. From 2000 to 2005, she served on the committee of the IAPT for Bryophytes.
Sources:
Personal Communication, September 2006.
