British botanist. Rupert Barneby first came to the United States in 1936 and established permanent residency in 1941. He was employed by the New York Botanical Garden from the 1950s until shortly before his death. He arrived at the Garden as a visiting scholar, later accepted a staff position as honorary curator of western botany, and went on to become a research associate and an editorial consultant for Brittonia.

A self-taught botanist, with a talent for discovering or rediscovering rare and local species, Barneby collected widely in the western United States and Mexico from 1938 to 1981, becoming a world expert in Fabaceae and Menispermaceae. In 1978 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from City University of New York. He was the recipient of many prestigious botanical awards, including the Millennium Botany Award from the International Botanical Congress in 1999 for a lifetime of contribution to science. To ensure his legacy, New York Botanical Garden established the Rupert C. Barneby Fund for Research in Legume Systematics in 1991.

Barneby was born at Trewyn, a country house in Monmouthshire, Wales, and attended Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. His interest in botany started early. By the time he was sent to public school, Barneby had assembled a not inconsiderable private herbarium and belonged to the Woolhope Club, a group of amateur naturalists in Herefordshire. At Harrow he met his lifelong partner, Dwight Ripley, who shared his passion for botany. After university, where he read history and modern languages, Barneby was given an ultimatum by his father to relinquish the attachment or else be disinherited. He never saw his father again. Barneby and Ripley went on annual expeditions that eventually took them throughout the Mediterranean area, and repeatedly to Algeria and Spain, to collect plants for their gardens at the Spinney, Ripley's house in Sussex. It was while vacationing in Spain that Barneby first developed his interest in Astragalus. In 1939, shortly before their move to the United States, they compiled an annotated list of the species grown at the Spinney (a total of 1138), which they had published in a fine-press edition. The plant collection was later dispersed to Kew, Cambridge, and private gardeners. A few of the plants have never since been re-introduced. Earlier that year they undertook an expedition to Crete with Peter Davis to search for the rare Senecio gnaphalodes, which resulted in Barneby's first published article 'Plants from Eastern Crete' in The New Flora and Silva.

Barneby and Ripley first visited North America in 1936 with the intention of collecting in Mexico, as a substitute destination for Spain where the civil war had prevented their usual collecting trip. They arrived in Los Angeles, but because of car trouble never made it to the Mexican border. The following year they returned to California and in 1938 began a holding garden in Los Angeles for their collections from expeditions to Death Valley and Titus Canyon. In London, they had mixed in literary circles that included W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, the Sitwells, and Cyril Connolly. They settled easily therefore into the expatriate community that had formed in Los Angeles around some of these writers in advance of the war. Their plant collections in the western United States from 1941 to 1953, attributed to Ripley and Barneby on herbarium labels with the designation Plantae Occidentale Selectae, yielded the bulk of new taxa described solely by Barneby. After 1953, and until 1961, Barneby collected mainly by himself; and post-1970, with Noel and Patricia Holmgren. After their first major expedition, Barneby took their specimens to the herbarium at UCLA for study but was turned away because he lacked the appropriate degree. The curator of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, Alice Eastwood, however, was welcoming and introduced him to Philip Munz, professor of botany at Pomona College, who had access to the Rancho Santa Ana herbarium, which holds the historic collections of Marcus Eugene Jones, the eccentric explorer-botanist well known among botanists for his 1923 revision of the genus Astragalus, the largest genus in North America. In 1941, once again forced to cancel their trip to Mexico, this time because of the war in Europe which made it difficult to cross the border, they decided to travel the path of Marcus Jones in Nevada. In one month of collecting they located 11 previously unidentified species, six in the genus Astragalus; by 1956, they had found 50 new species and ten subspecies. Twelve accounts of their collecting expeditions, written by Ripley, appeared in the Quarterly Bulletin of the Alpine Garden Society of Great Britain between 1942 and 1950; excerpts from these were reprinted in 1978 under the title Impressions of Nevada: the countryside seen through the eyes of an Englishman. Ripley also provided financial support for Eastwood and Howell's privately published series, Leaflets of Western Botany, in which many of Barneby's publications would appear over the next decade including his revision of the genus Astragalus, a series of 20 papers with the common title Pugillus Astragalorum. Later, Barneby contributed the treatment of Astragalus to Munz's Flora of California. His first monograph was A Revision of the North American Species of Oxytropis. Published in 1952 in the Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, it included a single new species, O. jonesii, discovered by Barneby & Ripley in Utah in 1947 and named in honour of Marcus Jones.

Early in 1942, before the collecting season had begun, the couple made a trip to New York. Their friend Jean Connolly introduced them into the vibrant art scene, which proved irresistible to Ripley, and in 1943 they moved there permanently. At both their country homes, first at Wappingers Falls, Duchess County, and later at Greenport, Long Island, they built large rock gardens, made mostly of native species from the North American West. Glimpse of the Garden by experimental filmmaker Marie Menken was shot in their garden at Wappingers Falls in 1957. As Ripley's assets steadily diminished, the couple sold off their collection of paintings, one by one. Miro's Constellation No.5, now at the Cleveland Museum of Art, provided the funds for their first collecting trip to Mexico, which they finally achieved in 1963. From then until 1967, they spent each autumn, from mid-October to mid-November, collecting in Mexico, especially the genus Dalea, which was Barneby's new obsession, and discovered 16 new species in all. Barneby's illustrated revision, Daleae Imagines, occupied him for more than a decade, appearing at last in 1977. After Ripley's death in 1973, his remaining assets were used to pay the debts of his estate. Howard Irwin, then president of the New York Botanical Garden, came to Barneby's rescue, securing him a paid appointment as research assistant on his revision of Cassia. He also arranged for Barneby to live on the grounds of the New York Botanical Garden. Barneby occupied the loft above Pierre Lorillard's old stone stable for more than twenty years, until 1998 when he moved into an apartment at Kittay House, a nursing home in the Bronx, only a few minutes from the Garden. By the end of his life, Barneby had named and described over 1,100 new taxa. His work on Astragalus culminated in the 1188 pages of the Atlas of North American Astragalus (1964), which treated 552 taxa, took twenty years in the making and remains the standard text in its field. When he finished the atlas, he donated his private herbarium of Astragalus to the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, so that his specimens could be studied in conjunction with those collected by Marcus Jones. Barneby was a member of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the International Association for Plant Taxonomy, and the New England Botanical Club, and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. More than twenty-five taxa are named after him , including Astragalus rupertii Villareal & M.A. Carranza , Castilleja barnebyana Eastw., and the genera Barnebya W.R. Anderson & B. Gates, Barnebyella Podlech, Barnebydendron J.H. Kirkbr. and Rupertia J.W. Grimes.

Sources:
D. Crase, 2001, "Ruperti Imagines: A Portrait of Rupert Barneby", Brittonia, 53(1): 1-40
Stanley L. Welsh, 2001, "Rupert C. Barneby", Taxon, 50(1): 285-292
Stanley L. Welsh, 2005, "Rupert C. Barneby and Pugillus Astragalorum", Brittonia, 57(4): 301-313.