British botanist who worked for lengthy periods in California and South Africa. Joseph Burtt Davy was born at Findern, Derby, and was educated privately. He worked for two years in the director's office at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, before travelling to California in 1892 as a research student. He remained a decade in the United States, in teaching positions at the University of California and then as Assistant Curator in the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. Burtt Davy then moved to South Africa in 1903, taking up a government post as Agrostologist and Botanist in Pretoria. He left the service of the government ten years later, having built up a fine herbarium collection in Pretoria, and went into farming in the Transvaal. It was the flora of the this area that he worked on following his retirement from farming in the early 1920s, when he returned to England to work at Kew on his Flora of the Transvaal and Swaziland. In 1925 he was appointed to a botanical post once more, joining the University of Oxford as a lecturer in tropical forest botany. As well as training students destined to work in the colonies, he was often called upon for identifications and produced several checklists of trees and shrubs, and built up a reference collection of woods. After his second retirement in 1939, Burtt Davy worked on the third volume of his Transvaal flora, though he died before it was published.

Sources:
L. C., 1941, Chronica Botanica, 6: 235.