Olive Mary Hilliard Burtt | |
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Born | Olive Mary Hillary 4 July 1925 |
Died | 30 November 2022 | (aged 97)
Alma mater | University of Natal |
Occupation | Botanist |
Spouse | B. L. Burtt |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Institutions | Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh |
Thesis | "A taxonomic revision of Streptocarpus subgenus Streptocarpus in Natal." (1965) |
Olive Mary Hilliard (née Hillary, 4 July 1925 – 30 November 2022) was a South African botanist and taxonomist. Hilliard authored 372 land plant species names, the fifth-highest number of such names authored by any female scientist.[1]
Hilliard was born in Durban on 4 July 1925.[2] She attended Natal University from 1943 to 1947, where she obtained an MSc and later a PhD. She worked at the National Herbarium in Pretoria in 1947-48 and was a lecturer in botany at Natal University from 1954 to 1962. In 1963 she became curator of the herbarium at Natal University and a research fellow. Her special fields of interest were the flora of Natal and the taxonomy of Streptocarpus, Compositae and Scrophulariaceae.
In 1964 she formed a professional and personal collaboration with Brian Laurence Burtt (1913-2008) who played a large part in the revitalising of a moribund Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Their collaboration resulted in numerous papers and three books, Streptocarpus: an African Plant Study (1971), The Botany of the Southern Natal Drakensberg (1987), and Dierama: The Hairbells of Africa (1991).[3][4]
Hilliard died on 30 November 2022, at the age of 97.[5][6][7][8]