The Barneby Monographs

Exemplary among Barneby’s publications for their scope and excellence are his encyclopedic revisionary monographs of many species-rich leguminous groups. The principle works, which treat over 2000 species (see Table below), were published in “The Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden” during three periods of Barneby’s career. His Atlas of North American Astragalus and his global monograph of the Western Hemisphere genus Dalea and allies, titled Daleae Imagines, mark the first phase and were based to a large extent on extensive fieldwork in the western United States and Mexico carried out between 1942 and 1971 in close collaboration with H. Dwight D. Ripley, Barneby’s long-time partner and financial backer. Because they incorporate Barneby’s detailed first-hand knowledge of most of the treated species in the field, these two works are usually considered to be the greatest of his publications, with the Atlas often deservedly referred to as Barneby’s “magnum opus.”

The second phase of Barneby’s career began after the death of Dwight Ripley in 1973, when Barneby took on the task of identifying and organizing undistributed legume collections generated by the Brazilian Planalto Expeditions (1964-1975), a joint NYBG-University of Brasília project led by Howard S. Irwin and later by William R. Anderson that generated over 40,000 plant collections from the region. In the same year, Barneby joined in fruitful collaboration with Irwin, at the time the leading student of the genus Cassia, and began working toward their monumental revisionary monograph of American Cassiinae (1982), which split Cassia into three separate genera (Cassia, Senna, and Chamaecrista). Although based heavily on Irwin’s earlier works on the group, by Irwin’s own admission, the keys and descriptions in the monograph were written almost entirely by Barneby. An equally skillful and expansive revision of American Mimosa, authored by Barneby alone and also based heavily on the Planalto collections, followed in 1991.

In the final phase of his career, beginning in the early 1990s, Barneby, in collaboration with James W. Grimes, over 40 years his junior, embarked on an in-depth systematic study of the New World synandrous mimosoid legumes. The results were published in a three-part monograph entitled Silk Tree, Guanacaste, Monkey’s Earring, in which Grimes’ morphological cladisitic analyses were artfully blended with Barneby’s masterful keys and descriptions. Their substantial reorganization of generic limits along carefully constructed phylogenetic hypotheses brought order to the taxonomic chaos that characterized the group previously. Most notably, the genus Pithecellobium, once the dumping ground for hundreds of anomalous mimosoid species of unknown affinity, was drastically reduced, with the majority of species reassigned to newly erected or resurrected genera. In the final volume, Barneby tackled the diverse genus Calliandra, which had been in a state of taxonomic neglect since the publication of Bentham’s preliminary treatment in 1875.

Barneby’s legacy in descriptive plant systematics is unsurpassed in the twentieth century. The completeness and quality of his monographic works is consistently of the highest order. The descriptions are thorough and artfully written, yet concise and accessible, the identification keys utilitarian, designed with the lay person in mind and stressing easily accessible attributes over technical and difficult-to-observe features. Most of the monographs are richly illustrated with high-quality line drawings of exemplar species and distribution maps for all taxa at or below the species level, the former skillfully depicting the essential diagnostic characters, the latter notable for their completeness, benefiting from Barneby’s vast knowledge of geography and language. Finally, although several of Barneby’s major works are now decades old, they are based on fundamentally modern concepts of plant species and phylogenetic relationship. Furthermore, given the species-richness of the groups treated and the present scarcity of taxonomic expertise on large plant clades, his works will continue to be the foundation for all future studies of the groups for the foreseeable future.

Monographs included in this project

Keys from the Barneby Monographs

Exsiccatae from the Barneby Monographs

Electronic Key to the American Genera of Synandrous Mimosoideae