Rod Saunders was a widely respected botanist in South Africa and abroad. He traveled extensively in search of seed for his indigenous seeds company, Silverhill Seeds, and was a partner in Frontier Laboratories, a propagation specialist business. Internationally renowned for his intimate knowledge of South Africa's indigenous plants, he had a passion for bulbs in particular - resulting in a project to locate and photograph every known species of Gladiolus in South Africa. It was at the end of this project, while visiting a forest reserve in northern KwaZulu-Natal, that he and his wife Rachel were abducted and killed in 2018.
