Peter Bally received formal training in neither taxonomy nor botanical illustration, but studied chemistry at first, a position with the
League of Nations taking him to
Albania and
Bombay in 1923/24 in order to test a possible antidote for malaria. By 1930 he was working in
Tanzania for an oil company, and studying medicinal and poisonous plants of the region. His botanical interests led to a study of plants, with an emphasis on succulents, in the semi-desert areas of eastern Africa. By 1938 he had been appointed government botanist at the herbarium of the
Coryndon Museum in Nairobi. He bought a small piece of land on the outskirts of the town and busied himself with constructing a house and establishing a garden of indigenous plants. By 1943 he undertook botanising expeditions to
Eritrea,
Ethiopia,
Somalia Ghana,
Kenya,
Sudan,
Tanzania,
Uganda and
Zimbabwe. In 1960 he relocated to
Swaziland and worked on the genus
Aloe accompanied at one time by
Gilbert Reynolds, the
Aloe specialist. In 1957 he returned to Europe, working for some time on the
Marnier-Lapostolle collection at the
Jardin Botanique Lès Cedres in
Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, and then for some 12 years at the
Conservatoire et Jardin Botanique in Geneva. Returning to Kenya in 1969 Peter Bally indulged in his botanical interests, becoming a familiar visitor at the Coryndon Museum Herbarium renamed the
East African Herbarium, and holding more than 700,000 plant specimens with field notes. Species named for him include:
Adenia ballyi,
Aloe ballyi,
Ceropegia ballyana,
Euphorbia ballyana,
Euphorbia ballyi,
Euphorbia proballyana,
Kalanchoe ballyi,
Sansevieria ballyi and
Echidnopsis ballyi, also
Ballya zebrina (Chiov. ex Chiarugi) Brenan which later became a synonym of
Aneilema zebrinum Chiov. ex Chiarugi. He described numerous species in the genera
Aloe,
Caralluma,
Ceropegia,
Echidnopsis,
Euphorbia,
Monadenium,
Pseudolithos,
Rhytidocaulon,
Sansevieria,
Senecio and
Stapelia. ==Publications==