Dr Soejatmi Dransfield
Honorary Research Fellow
Team
Specialism
Generic delimitation of paleotropical bamboos (Poaceae: Bambusoideae) Taxonomy of bamboos from Malesia, Thailand and Madagascar
In late 1960 when I was a staff member of the Bogor Herbarium, Indonesia, I met the late Prof. R.E. Holttum from Kew (the author of 'The Bamboos of the Malay Peninsula', 1956). I was working on Malesian grasses at that time. He suggested I should work on bamboos. Malesia, and SE Asia in general, is rich in bamboos and bamboos are very important for local people. Furthermore classification of bamboos was unsatisfactory (and is still).
After I completed my PhD at the University of Reading in 1975, with my thesis 'The Revision of Cymbopogon (Gramineae)' (lemon grasses), I went back to Bogor and started working on bamboos.
Kew's Herbarium has a rich bamboo collection; two botanists worked on bamboos and produced books which have become the basic knowledge of bamboo classification. They were W. Munro who published 'Monograph of Bambusaceae, including descriptions of all species' in 1868, and J.S. Gamble who produced 'The Bambuseae of British India' in 1896. Based on these two publications and Holttum's paper, and bamboo specimens in the Kew Herbarium, I began to do research on the taxonomy of paleotropical bamboos.