Bob Haller’s Plants of California botany class at UCSB is legendary. “Three giant projector screens side by side, a coordinated dissolve system, and hundreds of stunning images of native plants and their habitats, set to a range of contemporary and classical music,” recalled Mary Carroll of her first day in Botany 103. “By the end of the hour, students wanted to get out into the California field and see these sights for themselves.”
And get outside is exactly what his students did with Bob Haller, who joined the university faculty in 1957 after completing his PhD at UCLA. He took them on four-day field trips to the desert, Central Coast, and Sierra Nevada, sharing his outdoorsmanship — an expertise that began during camping trips and hikes with his parents while growing up in Santa Monica — and explaining the surrounding ecosystems. While these trips were unforgettable learning excursions, they were also part of Haller’s lifelong love of enjoying the natural world with others.
He was a noted expert on pines, contributing his research most significantly in Flora of the Four Corners Region and in the comprehensive Jepson Manual of native and naturalized California plants. “His observations and collections clarified the variations found among four different pine species which had puzzled botanists for the last century,” explained Bruce Reed, a horticulturist at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden (SBBG). “His collections and notes span nearly 70 years, and his 5,000 annotated dried specimens from 300 different localities are now kept at the John Robert Haller Pine Collection at UCSB in the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration.” Haller and his wife, Dr. Nancy Vivrette, traveled from Canada to Guatemala and North Dakota, collecting what became baseline research and essential Pinus specimens over the decades.