Background
Katharine grew up in a vast Tudor-style rectory in Tansor.
Katharine grew up in a vast Tudor-style rectory in Tansor.
She was coached in music from the age of five and was a competent watercolour painter by the age of six. At the age of 19 she was sent to the Continent to study languages and drawing. Her elder brother Horatio, who was a naturalist, traveller and writer, supported her in this venture.
Her older sister, Anna, was already living in Düsseldorf, having been banished in disgrace after falling pregnant.
In all Katharine spent seven years abroad, acquiring proficiency in drawing and fluency in French, German and Flemish. Having settled in, complete with a grand piano, Katharine started painting plants.
The Saunders" first home was a sprawling thatched building with shady verandahs overlooking the Tongaat River and whimsically named "The House by the Drift". Her interest in plants was furthered by the Scots horticulturalist, Mark McKen, who worked on the sugarcane farm in a temporary capacity and later resumed his curatorship of the Durban Botanic Gardens.
McKen fixed a variety of Natal orchids to trees in her garden, sparking in her a lifelong interest in orchids.
By the 1870s her growing family and her husband"s thriving career saw them occupying "Tongaat House" which became a convenient meeting-place for botanists of the area. Katharine"s enthusiasm for painting, botany and conservation generated the interest which held the groups together. The quality of her paintings led inevitably to her sending of live specimens and corresponding with the Hookers at Kew, West. H. Harvey in Dublin and Harry Bolus in Cape Town.
On an extended visit to England in 1881/82 she met Joseph Dalton Hooker and William Turner Thiselton-Dyer who would become director of Kew in 1885.
On her return to Natal she was visited by Marianne North, the English traveller and botanical artist. She donated a selection of her paintings to the Natal Museum in Pietermaritzburg in 1889.
About 700 of her paintings have survived, some are to be found in the Tongaat Group Library. Her pressed specimens are at Kew and the herbarium of Trinity College, Dublin.
Katharine Saunders sent some 426 specimens to Kew during the period 1881 to 1889 - about 16 of these were named after her though most were later regarded as synonyms.
Amongst these were Schrebera saundersiae Harvard, Habenaria saundersiae Harvard, Drimiopsis saundersiae Baker, Sisyranthus saundersiae North.E. Branch, Dermatobotrys saundersii Bolus and Haemanthus katharinae Baker.
