John Dryden Piggott, rector and squire of Edgmond, and married Thomas Boone Roupell, an East India Company official, on 16 September 1840.

Among the others Roupell befriended were Baron von Ludwig, planner and developer of the Botanical Garden in Cape Town, and the Kew plant collector, James Bowie.

Having received the blessing of both Hooker and Wallich, the plates were handed to the eminent Victorian lithographer, Paul Gauci, who prepared the illustrations for the printer W. Nicol of the Shakespeare Press on Pall Mall.

One hundred subscribers were listed, a large portion being from the Peerage, and not counting Victoria, Prince Albert and the Directors of the East India Company.

Pole Evans passed the paintings on to Mary Gunn, librarian at the Botanical Research Institute, who immediately recognised them as the long sought-after collection.

The short-lived taxon Roupellia grata, a flowering creeper from Sierra Leone and named to honour various members of the Roupell family, was lumped as Strophanthus gratus by the French botanist Henri Ernest Baillon.