Edwin Percy Phillips

Who was Edwin Percy Phillips?

Edwin Percy Phillips, was a South African botanist and taxonomist, noted for his monumental work The Genera of South African Flowering Plants first published in 1926.

Phillips attended the South African College, which later became the University of Cape Town, where he graduated under Prof. Henry Harold Welch Pearson, obtaining a BA in 1903, an MA in 1908 and a DSc in 1915 for a treatise on the flora of the Leribe Plateau in Lesotho.

He was the son of Ralph Edwards Phillips and Edith Minnie Crowder. He married Edith Isabel Dawson about 1912 and they had 2 daughters before her death c1948. He secondly married Susan Kriel c1949. Phillips named the genus Susanna belonging to the family Asteraceae after her.