Cythna Letty
Cythna Lindenberg Letty (1895-1985) was a South African botanical artist who worked with Pretoria’s National Herbarium for about 40 years. She is remembered for the quality and quantity of her paintings and drawings, and for her book Wild Flowers of the Transvaal (1962). When South Africa switched to decimal currency, she designed the floral motifs on the 10-, 20-, and 50-cent coins. She was also a poet and published Children of the Hours in her eighties.
Cythna came from a large, musical family. She was the eldest child of Josina Christina Lindenberg’s second marriage and was named after a heroine in Percy Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam. The Lettys were a disciplined clan; the children from Josina’s first marriage joined them, and they were taught to play many instruments. Cythna attended 13 different schools before finishing at Pretoria Girls’ High School. Her father, Walter Letty, moved the family often, and World War I kept him in France for a time.
Her early work included teaching and nursing. She trained as an artist, first at the Veterinary Division at Onderstepoort drawing diseased organs, then at the Division of Plant Industry with Dr I.B. Pole-Evans. She produced hundreds of drawings for Flowering Plants of Africa, including Anemone fanninii, before resigning in 1938 to marry Oscar Forssman. After the birth of a son, she returned to botany in 1945 and stayed until 1966.
Letty received several honors: a silver medal from the Royal Horticultural Society in 1970, a revision of the genus Zantedeschia published in Bothalia in 1973, and an honorary LL.D. from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1973. Her legacy is celebrated through the Cythna Letty Nature Reserve near Barberton and the Cythna Letty Medal awarded by the Botanical Society of South Africa for promoting South African flora through botanical art. Plants named after her include Crassula lettyae and Aloe lettyae, and her author abbreviation is Letty.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 17:24 (CET).