Joseph Burtt Davy

Who was Joseph Burtt Davy?

Joseph Burtt Davy was a Quaker botanist and agrostologist. He was the first curator of the Forest Herbarium at the Imperial Forestry Institute when it was founded in 1924 under the Directorship of Professor Robert Scott Troup.

He attended school at Ilkley in West Yorkshire. In 1891, he joined Kew Gardens as a technical assistant, leaving shortly after for the USA where he enrolled in the botany department at the University of California. Here he studied agriculture from 1893-96 and took up the post of botanist at the Agricultural Experiment Station in California between 1896-1901, describing the Cyperaceae and Gramineae for A Flora of Western Middle California by Willis Linn Jepson. Here he also met his wife-to-be, Alice Bolton, a native Californian.

In early 1903, he was appointed botanist and agrostologist with the newly founded Transvaal Department of Agriculture. Burtt Davy wasted no time in starting a collection of Transvaal plants, a process by which he acquired an intimate knowledge of the subject. These first specimens came from Meintjieskop, Irene and a trip to the western Transvaal - at the time of his retirement in 1913, his collected specimens numbered 14,000.