I was introduced to plants by being taught to grow vegetables by my father at age 7 and got hooked when I discovered Orbea variegata in the garden of the house we moved into in Port Elizabeth at age 10. I have been collecting herbarium specimens since my second year at Wits in 1978 and photographing plants since Honours in 1981. I did my PhD on Dicliptera and Peristrophe in southern Africa at Pietermaritzburg (1982 to 1985) and have been employed as a professional botanist at Wits since 1988. I have collected 14,600 herbarium specimens, with the main collection in J and duplicates sent to E, MO, PRE and others. I have currently slowed down on collecting until I have identified all of my backlog. I am a co-author on 140 scientific papers, book chapters or conference proceedings, with the most recent milestone being a worldwide revision of the 51 species of Syncolostemon in Kew Bulletin. I have a particular interest in Acanthaceae and Labiatae (=Lamiaceae), but follow up on very diverse interesting leads. I mainly work on the summer rainfall flora, especially Mpumalanga and ultramafic (serpentine) areas.