Species Oldenburgia arbuscula

For Franz (Frantz) Pehr Oldenburg (1740–1773), Swedish soldier in the Dutch East India Company. He was an amateur botanist and plant collector who arrived at the Cape in 1765 and collected specimens for Joseph Banks in London and Peter Jonas Bergius in Stockholm. He went on collecting expeditions with Carl Peter Thunberg (1742–1828) around Cape Town (1772) and with Francis Masson (1741–1805) as far as the Breede River for two months in 1772 and 1773. Later that year, Governor Joachim van Plettenberg asked Thunberg to go to Madagascar as ship’s surgeon and itinerant botanist. He declined but recommended Oldenburg, who collected briefly in Madagascar and the Comoros, before he died at sea of a fever, probably malaria, in 1773, and was buried on the Barren Islands near Madagascar.