Rachel Saunders

Rachel Saunders was a widely respected botanist in South Africa and abroad. She traveled extensively in search of seed for her indigenous seeds company, Silverhill Seeds, and was a partner in Frontier Laboratories, a propagation specialist business. Internationally renowned for her intimate knowledge of South Africa’s indigenous plants, she had a passion for bulbs in particular – resulting in a project to locate and photograph every known species of Gladiolus in South Africa. It was at the end of this project, while visiting a forest reserve in northern KwaZulu-Natal, that she and her husband Rod were abducted and killed in 2018.