Toney Monroe Keeney

Keeney grew up near San Saba and attended Sam Houston State Teachers College in Huntsville, where he earned his Master’s degree under Dr. Claude McLeod. Beginning in 1967, Keeney taught biology at Southwest Texas College in Uvalde, and spent extensive time in the field collecting plants locally and from New Mexico and Mexico. Following the Texas snowbell’s listing as a federally endangered species in 1984, Keeney played a key role in researching propagation methods, and in reintroducing cultivated seedlings back into limestone cliffs and mesic canyons of the Edwards Plateau (for which he was awarded the 1988 Nancy Benedict Memorial Award by the Native Plant Society of Texas). Also, with his spouse Carrie Keeney, he devoted much effort to building up a herbarium at the College that now holds more than 14,000 pressed, dried, mounted and labeled specimens, representing over 500 species. The collection is an important resource for documenting plant distributions in the Trans-Pecos, Edwards Plateau, and the Rio Grande Plains.