Kathleen
Annie Lansdell, botanical artist, attended the Government Art School in Durban
and continued her training at the Royal College of Arts and Crafts in London.
She succeeded Miss M. Franks* as botanical artist at the Natal Herbarium after
the latter left in November 1914. During her first few months at the herbarium
she prepared plates for Volume 7 of Natal
plants, by John Medley Wood*, but the work remained incomplete owing to Wood's
death in August 1915. From 1917 to her retirement in 1943 Lansdell worked
mainly in the Division of Botany and Plant Pathology in Pretoria, where she
contributed many plates to the first few volumes of Flowering plants of South Africa. Volume 35 of this publication, which
appeared in 1962, was dedicated to her. From about 1918 she prepared plates and
text for a series titled "Weeds of South Africa". Fourteen of these
contributions, each dealing with a single species of weed, were published in
the Journal of the Department of
Agriculture of South Africa from 1920 to 1926. Another paper by her, "Some common adulterants found in Agricultural seeds", appeared in the same journal in 1920. She also prepared
illustrations for Plant forms and their
evolution in South Africa (1925) by J.W. Bews*, and for many government
publications.
After her
retirement Lansdell lived in Durban and continued to paint Natal plants. A folio of 76 of her plates, with descriptive notes, was presented to the Killie Campbell Library, Durban, in
1962. The folio comprised original water-colours that she hoped to have published as "The flowering plants of Natal and Zululand". Lansdell was not married.
