TONY Abbott will be remembered for many things, including his long stride. He would stride across the grasslands of his favourite haunts, Pondoland and particularly Umtamvuna, suddenly stopping to examine what to some of us seemed a very unspectacular little plant, but it excited Tony. He walked the legs off me several times, including once when I tried to follow him up the gorge at Umtamvuna – I eventually waved him and the rest of the party on, while I sat panting on a rock.
Tony was born in England in 1936 and came out to Africa in 1956. He was many things during his life, including farmer, tour guide, cattle drover and amateur botanist, but it is of course for the last that he leaves the greatest legacy. He was self-taught, and yet became one of the foremost amateur botanists in the world.
He was particularly well known for his work on the Pondoland region, one of perhaps 50 major botanical regions in the world still in a reasonably natural state. It is the smallest of South Africa’s botanical ‘hot spots’, containing no fewer than 1450 mainly flowering plant species. He discovered and had named after him five species of plants, the Psoralea abbottii, the Apodytes abbottii, the Erica abbottii, the Maytenus abbottii and the Lydenburgia abbottii, one of South Africa rarest endemic tree species. Not bad for a self-taught amateur.
Tony was a busy man. In 1989 he established PlantLife, now published by the KZN Coastal Branch of the Botanical Society of South Africa and the Durban Botanical Gardens Trust, an internationally renowned publication that is read by everyone who is anyone in botany. He was prominent in CREW, Custodians of Rare and Endangered Wildflowers, a part of the South African Biodiversity Institute, in fact CREW in KZN found at least nine new endangered species, thanks largely to Tony. He edited and compiled Jewels of Mtamvuna: A Guide to the Natural Wonders of Mtamvuna, which immediately became a handbook for anyone who wanted to know anything at all about the Umtamvuna Nature Reserve.
Tony had been documenting the vegetation of Umtamvuna for many, many years, going out every week with a small group of similarly-minded people who were proud to be his field assistants and to work with him in the herbarium there.
Above all Tony was just a wonderful human being. He was an absolute gentleman, always; he was humble and blessed with a quiet wit. On meeting he would always have something nice to say, always with a smile. He featured quite often in this column, because I would email him photographs of strange botanical phenomena in our garden and Tony would always come back with a logical explanation for it, or if the phenomenon turned out be an alien tree, he’d growl (nicely of course), ‘Get rid of it!’
Tony died at the weekend after a long illness, leaving Maggie, son Jan, and daughters Suzanne and Fiona. You will be greatly missed by us all, Tony. Godspeed.
