Joseph William Mathews, horticulturalist, was the son of
Robert Mathews and his wife Mary Elizabeth, born Stockton. He received his
training in horticulture at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew (near London) and
came to South Africa in 1895 to take up an appointment as horticulturalist in
the Cape Town Public Gardens. However, he almost immediately set up as a
nurseryman and florist in Cape Town. He won many prizes for the flowers he
cultivated and for floral arrangements, and is regarded as one of the founders
of floriculture in South Africa (Compton, 1949).
When the National Botanical Garden was established at Kirstenbosch in 1913
he was appointed as its first curator, under the director of the gardens,
Professor H.H.W. Pearson*. They began to lay out and develop the garden with
great enthusiasm, with Mathews continuing the work after Pearson's death in
1916. From 1919 he and the new director, Professor R.H. Compton* continued to
expand the garden, despite the meager resources then available. Mathews also
dealt with the numerous contributions of plants from an enthusiastic public and
was always on call for information and advice. Compton (1949) described him as 'a
gardener of the old school, stocky and sturdy in build, a fount of energy, not
sparing himself and expecting the same of others, sternly economical, practical
to his fingertips in all the multitude of tasks which fell to him for lack of adequate
staff, loving his plants first and foremost, devoted to Kirstenbosch'. He
introduced many indigenous plants to cultivation, especially bulb plants, some
of which were undescribed species, and was one of the first local
horticulturalists to encourage the use of indigenous plants. He retired in April
1936.
Mathews published a series of articles on the cultivation of
indigenous plants at Kirstenbosch in the Journal
of the Botanical Society of South Africa. These dealt with the cultivation
of Buchu (1918), Karoo ferns and filmies (1919), South African Iridaceae
(1923), succulents (1927), gladioli (1928), the haworthias (1929), lachenalias
(1930), and ixias (1931). Other articles
by him in the same journal dealt with progress at Kirstenbosch (1923),
flowering plants of garden merit at Kirstenbosch (1931, 1934), notes on
deferred germination (1933), lawn grasses on trial at Kirstenbosch (1935), and
South African conifers for garden use (1935). He also publishes many articles on these and other topics in the journal Veld and Flora. Shortly after his retirement he
wrote a book on The cultivation of
non-succulent South African plants (Cape Town, 1938), the first of its
kind in South Africa. For many years he was the horticultural correspondent of The Cape Argus.
Mathews was elected a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural
Society around 1928 and an Associate of Honour of that society in 1932. He was
a member of the Cape Natural History Club in the nineteen-thirties and acted as
club consultant for succulents to at least 1939. The Mathews Rockery at Kirstenbosch was named
after him, as were the plant species Geissorhiza
mathewsii and Tritonia mathewsiana,
both by H.M.L. Bolus*.
Mathews was married to Elizabeth Menzies Greenhill in 1906
and they had one daughter.
