Australian botanist and conservationist. Nancy Burbidge was born at Cleckheaton in Yorkshire, England. Her father, a clergyman, was appointed to a parish in Western Australia when his only daughter was in her first year of life. The Burbidge family thus relocated to Katanning, where Nancy's mother founded the Katanning (Kobeelya) Church of England Girls' School.

Nancy Burbidge attained her undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications at the University of Western Australia (BSc, 1937; MSc, 1945; DSc, 1961) and after graduating in the late 1930s was awarded free passage to England by a group of shipping companies, where she worked at Kew Herbarium revising the Australian genus Enneapogon. Returning to Perth in 1940 she devoted herself to studying the ecology and taxonomy of plants in her home state, gaining experience in field work, and in 1943 moved to Adelaide, where she was appointed assistant agronomist at the Waite Agricultural Research Institute. This entailed studying arid areas of South Australia with the goal of regenerating native pasture, and she thus became an authority on native grasses. She later published three volumes of Australian Grasses (1966, 1968, 1970).

From October 1946 Burbidge was a systematic botanist at the Division of Plant Industry of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). As her role expanded from identification tasks to building up and organising the division's herbarium, she was re-appointed as curator of the Herbarium Australiense (later the Australian National Herbarium, CANB), for which she largely provided the foundation. Burbidge's reputation grew in the 1940s-1950s as she became botanical secretary for the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (1948-1952) and edited Australasian Herbarium News. In 1953 she was seconded as the Australian Botanical Liaison Officer at Kew, where she photographed and indexed type specimens of Australian plants, and microfilmed Robert Brown's notebooks. Returning to Canberra in 1954, she began working towards her doctorate, and six years after achieving this was promoted to senior principle research scientist at CSIRO

Burbidge was an industrious author, publishing a number of major works intensively in the 1960s and 1970s. Her taxonomic focus was on genera in the Asteraceae, Fabaceae, Myrtaceae, Poaceae and Solanaceae families. As well as general works on ecology and phytogeography, she prepared two major bibliographic works, Dictionary of Australian Plant Genera (1963) and the compilation Plant Taxonomic Literature in Australian Libraries (edited by A. McCusker, 1978). Her monograph "Phytogeography of the Australian Region" (Australian Journal of Botany, 1960) contributed to her doctorate, and was followed by the appearance of a number of long works. Plants of the Australian Capital Territory (co-authored with Max Gray, 1963), Flora of the Australian Capital Territory (with Max Gray, 1970), and the popular works The Wattles of the Australian Capital Territory (1961) and The Gum Trees of the Australian Capital Territory (1963) all came out within a few years of each other. From 1973 she directed the Flora of Australia project at the Australian Academy of Science. She was also a skilled botanical artist and often illustrated her own work.

Burbidge was a founding member of the National Parks Association of the Australian Capital Territory, in which she was very active. She campaigned for the establishment of the Tidbinbilla Fauna Reserve and led the lobbying that led to the Namadji National Park. She was one of the initiators of both the Australian Systematic Botany Society and the Council of Heads of Australian Herbaria, and was awarded the Clarke Medal of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1971 for her efforts in taxonomic botany and ecology, and the Order of Australia in 1976. Burbidge was also a member of the Australian Federation of University Women and served as president (1957-1958) and international secretary (1961-1968) of the Pan-Pacific and South East Asia Women's Association. She supported causes including scholarships for Aboriginal women and a women's hall of residence at the University of Papua New Guinea. She died in 1977 after falling victim to cancer and is commemorated in an altar front at St Michael's Anglican Church in Perth and in the Nancy T. Burbidge Memorial amphitheatre at the National Botanic Gardens in Canberra.

Sources:
G.M. Chippendale, 1993, "Burbidge, Nancy Tyson (1912-1977)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, 13: 298-299
N. Hall, 1978, Botanists of the Eucalypts: 30
A.E. Orchard, 1999, in Flora of Australia (2nd edition), 1: 34.