With the death of Ralph Nowell Philbrick on July 10, 2017, the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden lost one of its former leaders, our local native plants and their habitats lost a champion and protector, and Santa Barbara’s environmental community lost a longtime friend and supporter.
Ralph was a professional botanist who specialized in the plant life of the California and Baja California islands. With his keen interest and a collaborative skill, Ralph expanded our knowledge of the plants that inhabit these special places. After earning a PhD from Cornell in 1963, he taught at UCSB and then became a taxonomist at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden in 1964. He became the garden’s director in 1974.
At the garden, Ralph organized the first symposium on the biology of the California islands in 1965, a meeting where professionals from around the country shared the results of their research with the public and with each other. Ralph went on to edit a volume on the proceedings that resulted from that initial meeting. He was involved in many of the subsequent meetings, including the 9th California Islands Symposium, the latest in this series, held in Ventura in October 2016. The symposia live on, the next set for 2020.