A new luxury housing complex, built just a few hundred meters from where black eagles roost on the cliff-face above the Walter Sisulu Botanic Gardens in Roodepoort, has disturbed the delicate eco-balance in the area. The area is the Bankenveld grassland, also home to colonial algae, estimated to be hundreds of millions of years old, and the oldest living organisms in Gauteng. The interaction between plants, birds and the landscape has been severely affected by run-off water from the complex, eroding the river bed, threatening the botanic gardens and the eagles. Dr Marion Bamford is a botanist, palaeobotanist and palaeoecologist at Wits University’s School of Geosciences. She believes botanists have a significant role to play in fostering understanding of how plants impact on issues of biodiversity, so that this sort of disaster doesn’t happen in the future.

Basics

Botany offers numerous career options. A plant taxonomist working in agriculture identifies and names plants and plant systematics. A botanist does the same thing, but finds work in a national herbarium, like Kirstenbosch, or the South African National Biodiversity Institute in Pretoria.

A plant ecologist does environmental impact assessments, which land developers should do before erecting new buildings. The Minister of the Environment wants to know which plants, insects and animals, and what archaeological and palaeontological records are at risk.

Plant pathologists work in crop diseases, crop development and crop soil sciences.

As an academic, doing research and lecturing, one earns approximately R150 000 to R300 000 annually. “If you’re working in a commercial plant, like a fertiliser factory, or developing insecticides, seeds, hybrids, crops, you’ll probably earn more.” Botanists find employment in commercial operations (e.g. mushroom farms, paper and pulp industry); in the state departments (e.g. Department of Water Affairs and Forestry) and independent agricultural boards (e.g. Citrus Growers’ Association). A student doing a post-graduate project with specific industrial applications can expect to find a job with a company that needs his or her knowledge.”

Job description

Botanists in industry, design laboratory testing, set up controlled trials of new plant strains, products or processes. They grow seedlings, testing them for disease and drought resistance. They get involved

Required studies or experience

You need a university pass with science subjects in order to study a BSc with chemistry, maths, biological sciences, and an emphasis on botany and genetics. At the universities of Natal and Stellenbosch, one can do a BSc in Agriculture. After graduating, company-specific training is offered, especially in factories where specialised research and processes are part of one’s job description.

Personality types

“Botanists tend to be meticulous. We spend hours making detailed investigations. You need lots of patience for microscope work when studying plant systematics. You must like being outdoors to do field work. Botanists are usually mildly eccentric, and have been known to talk to their plants. We get very involved in our subject and, like the birds that populate the wetlands or grasslands, we tend to be a bit territorial!”

An average day

“I live two lives, really. One is in the office, at the computer and the microscope, reading literature surveys, and writing up my research. I also lecture two undergraduate and one post-graduate course at Wits University.”

Marion’s other life is in the field, collecting fossils and excavating. “In order to interpret fossils you must first understand modern plant systems, and how different soils, climate and altitude interact. That means camping, walking through mud and rain, and enduring hot temperatures and mosquitoes. I work in the fossil sites of the Olduvai Gorge and Laetoli, in Tanzania; also at Koobi Fora in Kenya. In this field there’s lots of international collaboration. I recently went to Brazil.”

The best and worst things about this job

“There are so many different interweaving aspects of botany: geology, zoology, ecology and ornithology. I see different places and ecosystems, meet different people on different projects. I’m lucky. There aren’t many palaeobotanists. I get to travel widely.”

The down-side of her job is never having enough time. “My projects never finish. There are always more questions wanting answers, more discoveries awaiting me. Actually, that’s no disadvantage. I see that as a plus.”

Liesl Jobson