Biography

British linguist, plant collector, horticulturalist, artist and author. Dwight Ripley was born in London, England, in 1908. His mother was an Anglo-Irish actress and his American father was the grandson of Sidney Dillon, who made a fortune from the Union Pacific Railroad. When Ripley was only four years old, his father died of the effects of alcoholism, leaving his entire estate to his son.

As a child Ripley built a rock garden and alpine house at the Spinney, his home in Sussex; and at school in Harrow he met his lifelong partner, Rupert Barneby, with whom he shared his love of plants. He studied languages at Oxford and in his final year published a collection of poems, only one of which is in English. His gift was so prodigious that eventually he was fluent in at least 15 languages, and able to read and write in about 30. He and Barneby began their plant explorations in the early 1930s in North Africa and Spain, collecting for their gardens at the Spinney and for Barneby's herbarium. In 1939, shortly before they moved 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 to private gardeners; some of these plant species have never since been re-introduced to cultivation.

Ripley and Barneby 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.

Ripley and Barneby made their first botanical discoveries during their travels in the western United States. Their plant collections from 1941 to 1953 are attributed to Ripley & Barneby on herbarium labels with the designation Plantae Occidentale Selectae. Ripley's accounts of their collecting trips were published in the Quarterly Bulletin of the Alpine Garden Society (UK), and excerpts were reprinted in 1978 under the title Impressions of Nevada: the Countryside seen through the Eyes of an Englishman. Several species are named after him including Cymopterus ripleyi Barneby, Astragalus ripleyi Barneby, Eriogonum ripleyi J.T. Howell, Gilia ripleyi Barneby (= Aliciella ripleyi (Barneby) J.M. Porter), Omphalodes ripleyana P.H. Davis and Cassia ripleyana H.S. Irwin & Barneby (= Senna ripleyana (H.S. Irwin & Barneby) H.S. Irwin & Barneby).

Gilia ripleyi was their first discovery, made on a trip to the Spotted Range of Nye County, Nevada, in 1940. On a later trip they discovered Cymopterus ripleyi on Yucca Flats and Phacelia parishii A. Gray on Frenchman Flats. These sites were incorporated into the Nevada Test Site in 1950. After the detonation of the one-kiloton bomb 'Ranger Able', Ripley wrote a long poem entitled Spring Catalogue, which commemorated their collecting trips and the plants they found: 'Ta ta Dwighteen! And you, Miss Parish/ May radioactive daydreams nourish!' After this Ripley refused to go to Nevada ever again.

Early in 1942, before the collecting season had begun, the couple made a trip to New York. Their friend Jean Connolly introduced them to 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.

More a horticulturalist than a botanist, Ripley published a great deal about rock gardening and about the plants he grew. His drawings, often on botanical themes, were exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery and at the influential Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which Ripley financed as a silent backer. One of his late series of drawings was entitled Travel Posters, designed not for tourists but for botanists, in which rare species are depicted beckoning botanists to visit their localities. Ripley sponsored a number of artists and writers as well as all of his partner's field work, whether Barneby travelled with him or on his own.

As Ripley's assets steadily diminished, the couple lived off sales from their painting collection. Miro's Constellation No.5, now at the Cleveland Museum of Art, provided the funds for their first collecting trip to Mexico in 1963. Every subsequent year until 1967, they spent one month, 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. Ripley, for his part, laboured for many years on an Etymological Dictionary of Vernacular Plant Names. He had nearly completed the manuscript, which is now in the library at the New York Botanical Garden, before he died in 1973, his health broken by alcohol, aged 65. The year after his death, Barneby paid tribute to their collecting life together by arranging for the editor and gallerist John Bernard Myers to publish Ripley's botanical journals in his obscure but influential art journal Parenthèse, and the American Rock Garden Society jointly awarded them its Marcel Le Piniec Award in recognition of the species they had introduced into cultivation.

Sources:
D. Crase, 2001, "Ruperti Imagines: A Portrait of Rupert Barneby", Brittonia, 53(1): 1-40
S.L. Welsh, 2001, "Rupert C. Barneby (1911-2000)", Taxon, 50(1): 285-292
S.L. Welsh, 2005, "Rupert C. Barneby and Pugillis astragalorum", Brittonia, 57(4): 301-313.