Gillian Condy, resident botanical artist SANBI

Ellaphie was born and educated in Pretoria. Shortly after matriculating from Pretoria High School for Girls she took her first job in 1939, working as a mapmaker in the Survey Department of the Witwatersrand Gold Mines.

At the end of the Second World War she travelled to the Netherlands to study watercolour painting under the tutelage of her uncle Gerhardus Hilhorst, a distinguished natural history artist.

Few people realised that she only started her career as a botanical artist in 1970, after retiring as a commercial artist in Cape Town.

She had always had a love and fascination for Pelargonium, so with help of Prof. Adri van der Walt and Dr Piet Vorster, together with their co-workers at Stellenbosch University, she set about illustrating all the known species. Three wonderful volumes, including 314 watercolours and 160 habitat sketches, were published in 1977, 1981 and 1988. The originals are preserved as a complete collection as they were acquired by the Brenthurst Library in Johannesburg in 1989. Recently completed plates of Pelargonium were found in the studio at the time of her death.

Ellaphie was a prolific artist, producing over 800 botanical watercolour paintings in 24 years. Other genera on which she worked on included Sarcocaulon, Haemanthus, Rhus, Plectranthus, Hessea, Strumaria, as well as Gasteria, Serruria and Diascia. Ellaphie was highly sought after by botanists to illustrate their ‘families’, as her fine colour paintings were reminiscent of the great masterpieces created in the 19th century.

One book review stated: “so much devotion has obviously gone into these plates, which not only bare her signature, but the date of completion. She is especially adept of conveying a feeling of texture; the plump, juicy, yet rather brittle quality of some of the succulent species, the rough scaliness of tubers, even the curious clamminess of the leaves in the species that are covered with glandular hairs”.

The Botanical Society of South Africa awarded Elaphie the Cythna Letty Medal in 1988: the South African Association of Botanists conferred the Certificate of Merit on her contribution to systematic botany and in 1990 she received a Gold Medal for the Haemanthus paintings at the Royal Horticultural Society Exhibition in London.

Ellaphie is commemorated in Pelargonium ellaphieae.

BAASA thanks the Ward-Hilhurst family and SANBI for allowing the publication of these images