Both2004

Both is the enchanting account of a remarkable fifty-year relationship: Dwight Ripley, the child heir to an American railroad fortune, and Rupert Barneby, the product of a wealthy, baronial English upbringing, shared an obsession with botany from the moment they met at an exclusive boys’ boarding school in England. Together they embarked on a lifelong pursuit of rare plants, first in Europe and then in the United States, where they migrated in the late 1930s.

Every spring they explored the American Southwest in a sputtering Dodge, discovering new species and cultivating the spoils at their renowned home gardens. Barneby published so many taxonomic findings that he became a world authority on legumes. But the two men had other interests as well: they were intimates in the expatriate...