Naturalist and botanical painter born in Durham, England. Her family, the Bowkers, arrived in the Eastern Cape as part of the 1820 influx of British settlers, and soon became one of the region's major landed families. She developed an early interest in collecting while growing up on the family farm in Lower Albany, where her father cultivated indigenous succulents. By the mid-1840s, her botanical drawings accompanied the family's shipments of plants and seeds to a relative in England. In 1845, she married Frederick William Barber, a cousin of Dr W.G. Atherstone, and the couple settled on a sheep farm, Highlands, near Grahamstown. They remained there from 1848 until 1870, with the exception of a few years farming land granted to Frederick Barber on the Swart Kei River for fighting in the war of Mlanjeni (1850-53). Mary Barber called it 'a paradise for naturalists'; because of its varied topography, and lived a fairly independent life during her husband's frequent absences.
By the late 1840s, she had begun a long correspondence with William Harvey at Trinity Herbarium, Dublin and sent him specimens. Besides the richness of her immediate environment, she had access, through her younger brother James Henry Bowker, a professional soldier, to specimens from the fringes of the colonial territory and in 1858 collected with him at the military station in Transkei. Their combined collection of specimens, illustrations, and descriptions contributed importantly to Harvey's multi-volume Flora Capensis.
Joseph Hooker at Kew greatly valued her unpaid services as an illustrator of rare, difficult-to-cultivate species, and presented her, in turn, with reports and scientific articles, as well as seeds to trial in South Africa. Despite the scarcity of books, she tried to keep up with the latest scientific literature and was a proponent of Charles Darwin, with whom she maintained a correspondence. Over time her research extended to zoology and entomology and resulted in several papers on insects, birds and fossils, as well as contributions to the work of other naturalists, including E.L. Layard for his Birds of South Africa (1867) and both specimens and illustrations of Lepidoptera sent to Roland Trimen and incorporated in his South African Butterflies (1887). Although considered by many among the period's most advanced women for her original scientific contribution, she emphasised racial hierarchy in her notes toward a planned book on tribal culture and natural history in South Africa, and shared in the hardening of racial attitudes and prejudices that was appearing in some settler communities of the later nineteenth century Cape.
The Barbers left Highlands in 1869 for the Kimberley diamond fields, travelled overseas in 1889, and settled for the remainder of their lives in Johannesburg. Mary Barber is commemorated by the genus Barberetta Harv., Brachystelma barberiae Harv., Iboza barberae N.E. Br. and Diascia barberae Hook. f. The genus Bowkeria Harv. is named after both Mary Elizabeth and her brother, James Henry Bowker.
Sources:
W. Beinart, 1998, "Men, Science, Travel and Nature, Journal of Southern African Studies, 24(4).
