Wessel Marais

South african botanist (1929–2013).

Wessel Marais B.Sc., M.Sc. (1929–2013) was a South African botanist and plant collector. Wessel was born in Colesberg, Northern Cape Province, on 28 December 1929, the youngest of the ten children of Barend Pieter Marais, the last blacksmith and wagon builder of Colesberg, who was of French Huguenot descent. He studied at Pretoria University (1947–1951) where he obtained an M.Sc. in Botany for the thesis 'A Morphological study of an indigenous species of rice, Oryza barthii A. Chev.'. He then (1952) joined the National Herbarium (PRE) where he undertook fieldwork during an internship in Kruger