THUNBERG'S CONTRIBUTION TO PLANT SYSTEMATICS IN SOUTH AFRICA

SUMMARY

After three years of personal botanical exploration at the Cape, 1772–1775, Carl Peter Thunberg increased the number of known species of vascular plants from South Africa by 66%. His detailed dissertations on individual genera laid the foundations of future monographic generic studies on the Cape Flora while his Flora Capensis (1823) was the first large scale attempt to document the Cape's botanical diversity. The Flora Capensis enumerated some 2,776 angiosperms (32% of the species currently known from the region) and although Thunberg failed to incorporate important taxonomic work by other late 18th and early 19th century botanists, his treatise remained an important reference work until the end of the 19th century.