Background
He was the son of Ralph Edwards Phillips and Edith Minnie Crowder.
He was the son of Ralph Edwards Phillips and Edith Minnie Crowder.
Phillips attended the South African College, which later became the University of Cape Town, where he graduated under Professor Henry Harold Welch Pearson, obtaining a Bachelor in 1903, an Master of Arts in 1908 and a Doctor of Science in 1915 for a treatise on the flora of the Leribe Plateau in Lesotho.
Phillips named the genus Susanna belonging to the family Asteraceae after her. 1907 Herbarium assistant at South African Museum (Professor Pearson honorary curator) 1910 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew - with Otto Stapf and John Hutchinson described Proteaceae for Flora Capensis. 1911 Curator of South African Museum Herbarium, succeeding Pearson who moved to the Bolus Herbarium 1911 Joined Percy Sladen Memorial Expedition to the Kamiesberge 1913 Field work on Leribe Plateau in Lesotho published in Annual
South.Afr.
Music. 16:1-379(1917) 1918 Curator of National Herbarium, Pretoria 1926 Botanical Survey Memoir Number. 10 - The Genera of South African Flowering Plants arranged according to Dalla Torre & Harms. 1931 "South African Grasses" 1939 "The Weeds of South Africa" 1939-1944 Chief of the Division of Botany and Plant Pathology, succeeding I. B. Pole-Evans 1944 Edited Christo Albertyn Smith and Estelle Van Hoepen"s The Common Names of South African Plants 1951 Second edition of The Genera of South African Flowering Plants Awards, honours and memberships Selected works.