Sandra Raphael (1939-2006)

Sandra Raphael died in April. She was on the staff of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary from 1969 to 1983. At the time of her appointment there was no one on the staff competent to deal with plant names and botanical terms, and Sandra filled the gap admirably. Although her degree was in English, which she had read at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (where Bob Burchfield gained his English degree), she came to us from the Linnean Society, where she was Librarian, and she had a great love of plants and knowledge about botanical books. She fitted the replacement definition of plantsman that she wrote for the Supplement: ‘an expert gardener; a connoisseur of plants’. Among the added quotations for the Supplement entry, she took care to include one from a book by her friend Wilfrid Blunt, with whom she later wrote The Illustrated Herbal (1979).

Often, when in the course of her work Sandra came across a plant, or a quotation that took her fancy, her face would light up and she would exclaim her delight out loud. In those days all quotation evidence was in the form of paper quotation slips, mostly hand-written. It was characteristic of her that when writing entries, no matter how legible a quotation slip was, if the quotation was to be used in her entry she would rewrite it in her own compressed black handwriting.

It was Sandra's being a trained librarian that no doubt led Robert Burchfield to give her charge of the in-house library at 40 Walton Crescent where the Supplement was first housed. Our card catalogue still has the cards she wrote during her incumbency.

Sandra was very much her own person, and when drafting for the Supplement came to an end, she decided to leave and work freelance, rather than be moved to another dictionary project. Her wide circle of friends and contacts facilitated this. She spent some time in the United States working on the Oak Spring Garden Library and its botanical books (S. Raphael, An Oak Spring Sylva (1989), An Oak Spring Pomona (1990)), and a period in the south of France at Clos du Peyronnet in Menton, the gardens founded by Humphrey Waterfield and managed by his nephew William Waterfield (a fellow plantsman and a colleague on the Supplement). She contributed several articles on 17th- and 18th-century gardeners and nurserymen to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. One of her last pieces of work was the copy editing of A Catalogue of Books printed in the Fifteenth Century now in the Bodleian Library (OUP, 2005-), and at the time of her death she was doing the same work on the British Library's catalogue of incunables.