Species Macowania conferta

For Dr Peter MacOwan (1830–1909), academic and plant collector and professor of chemistry at Huddersfield, England. He moved to South Africa for health reasons, was principal of Shaw College, Grahamstown (1862), science master at Gill College, Somerset East (1869), director of the Cape Town Botanical Gardens and curator of the Cape Government Herbarium (1881) to which he contributed many specimens. He was one of the first professors of botany at the South African College, Cape Town (now the University of Cape Town) and in 1892 became a Cape government botanist doing advisory work for the farming community and writing nearly 1 200 scholarly articles for the Cape Agricultural Journal. After his retirement (1905), he worked at the Albany Museum herbarium, where many of his early specimens were housed.