Australian clergyman and botanist who became an authority on orchids in his later life. Herman Rupp was born in Port Fairy, Victoria, to a Prussian-born clergyman and his Tasmanian wife. He took his bachelor's degree at the University of Melbourne (1897) and was ordained as an Anglican minister in 1899, then as a priest in 1901. He served in various parishes in Victoria and Tasmania (1920-1922), but spent most of his life in New South Wales, marrying Florence Mabel Dowe at Tamworth in 1904. The couple had three children.

Rupp was a keen amateur botanist since boyhood and collected plants everywhere he went. While a student in Melbourne he had contacted Ferdinand von Mueller, for whom he collected plants during holidays. He began making records of his botanical activities in 1892 and from 1899 made inventories of the native plants of every parish in which he served. From 1924 he began to focus on his favourite family, the orchids, at which time J.H. Maiden published some of his writings in the Australian Naturalist; the first of some 200 papers that Rupp would publish (mainly on orchids). He also penned two authoritative books, a Guide to the Orchids of New South Wales (1930) and The Orchids of New South Wales (1943, reissued in 1969), and was commissioned to update R.S. Rogers' entry on orchids in the Australian Encyclopaedia in 1948.

Suffering from arthritis which curtailed his collecting, Reverend Rupp spent his retirement cultivating orchids at his homes in Sydney, Northbridge and Willoughby, though he often complained of drought affecting his efforts. During the Second World War he saved his rationed bath water for his most precious plants. In a letter to fellow orchidologist Fred Fordham in 1942 Rupp notes that, threatened with a Japanese raid bursting water supply pipes, he would be more scared of the resulting drought than the enemy raid itself, so keen was his love for his plants. Meanwhile he was much troubled by the long periods during which he received no word from his son, Arthur, who was serving in South East Asia.

The flowering of a rare species would bring him great joy, such as he describes in a letter to Isobel Bowden in 1948, exclaiming his thrill at "the discovery of three incipient racemes on my Norfolk Island Dendrobium brachypus. This species has not been seen flowering since 1804!" Bowden, an orchid enthusiast based in the west of Sydney, first corresponded with Rupp in 1947, in which year the pair met and struck up an ongoing friendship over their common passion. Rupp's sense of humour and amiable character is evident in the way he refers to orchids in his correspondence, describing little flowering plants as 'imps' and Prasophyllum as 'prassies' He was not keen on the use of vernacular names, however, unless pertinent. He was particularly tickled by the name of a fellow plant hunter who discovered two new species of Prasophyllum in Victoria, as he tells Joyce Vickery in 1942: "The gentleman who sent it rejoices in the name of Beauglehole. If [W.H.] Nicholls describes it I hope he won't name it P. Beaugleholei!" He must have been delighted when Nicholls indeed did name the species beaugleholei.

Rupp fell seriously ill in 1949 and at the same time his wife suffered a heart attack, but in 1950 he made one of his final exploratory trips, visiting the Western Slopes at Wellington, before he too began to experience serious cardiac problems and respiratory trouble. Nevertheless he continued his work at the National Herbarium of New South Wales, where he was appointed honorary curator of orchids. The herbarium received his personal collection of 1,500 specimens (representing 470 species) by degrees from the late 1940s. He had earlier given 5,000 specimens to the University of Melbourne (MELU).

Rupp was a member of the Linnean Society of New South Wales and the Field Naturalists' Club of Victoria, and received the Royal Society of New South Wales' Clarke Medal (1949) and the Australian Natural History Medallion of the Field Naturalists' Club (1954). Several plant species bear his name, including Racosperma ruppii (Maiden & Betche) Pedley and Corunastylis ruppii (R.S.Rogers) D.L.Jones & M.A.Clem.

Sources:
D.F. Blaxell, 1978, "Rupp's 'Orchids of New South Wales' - Date of Publication", Orchadian, 6: 42
L. Fraser, 1957, Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, 82(1): 4
L.A. Gilbert, 1992, The Orchid Man: the life, work and memoirs of the Rev. H.M.R. Rupp, 1872-1956
L.A. Gilbert, 1988, "Rupp, Herman Montague Rucker (1872-1956)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, 11: 480-481
R. Rupp, Reverend H.M.R. Rupp's manuscript notebooks held at the Library of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney: RBGS MS 584
J.H. Willis, 1956, "The Passing of a Great Orchidologist (Rev. H.M.R. Rupp, 1872-1956)", Victorian Naturalist, 73: 105-110.