Alfred Barton Rendle

Who was Alfred Barton Rendle?

Alfred Barton Rendle FRS was an English botanist.

Rendle was born in Lewisham and educated at St Olave's Grammar School and St John's College, Cambridge. He was Keeper of Botany at the Natural History Museum from 1906 to 1930, in succession to George Robert Milne Murray.

In 1905, Rendle attended the International Botanical Congress in Vienna, where he was appointed on to the editorial committee for the International Rules of Botanical Nomenclature a role which he continued in until 1935.

Rendle published a number of books. Perhaps the best known of these was The Classification of Flowering Plants, which saw a gap of over 20 years between the publication of its two volumes - the first was published in 1904, but readers had to wait until 1925 for volume two. This long gap was attributed by Rendle to his "increasing official and non-official duties". He was also botany editor for the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, published in 1911.

Rendle was president of the Quekett Microscopical Club from 1916 to 1921 and president of the Linnean Society from 1923 to 1927.