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Monica Mary Cole died in London on 8 January 1994. She was a leader in the field of geo-botany and her death will be mourned by many friends and colleagues in England and abroad.
She was born in 1922 and spent her early years in Wimbledon and attended Bedford College, from where she graduated, in 1943, with first class honours in Geography, with geology as a subsidiary subject. For the rest of the war years she served as a research assistant in the Ministry of Town and Country Planning. She found time for her own research and qualified for a doctorate in 1947.
Monica began her academic career in the University of Cape Town. She believed that geographical research should begin in the field. She carried out a detailed land utilization survey of the agriculturally important and geographically interesting Elgin district, a synclinal basin enclosed by ridges. Her report into the soils and the anomalies of climate that affected the yield of crops (1949) was one of the most thorough and useful land utilization surveys carried out anywhere in South Africa.
Her move from Cape Town to the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 1948 led to her interest in the savannas. She became interested in vegetation...