The headmaster George Herbert regularly corresponded with and received plant specimens from William Kensit of Grahamstown, South Africa.

Kensit requested that the headmaster send him one of his pupils as an assistant; Harry Bolus duly landed at Port Elizabeth from the ship Jane in March 1850.

In 1864 he lost his eldest son of six years, and Francis Guthrie who had become a close friend, suggested his taking up botany to ameliorate his loss.

He started his botanical collection in 1865 and was soon corresponding with Joseph Hooker at Kew, William Henry Harvey in Dublin and Peter MacOwan in Grahamstown.

In 1875, he joined his brother Walter in Cape Town, settling in the suburb of Kenilworth, where they founded a stockbroking firm called Bolus Bros.

[5] Harry Bolus corresponded widely with his contemporaries, including a number of famous people such as the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace,[7] the English botanist and explorer Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker and the South African writer and poet C. Louis Leipoldt.