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Cast concrete bench with arms and a paved area in front. Originally had a wood lath seat which has now rotted away. When first erected, the seat commanded a vista to the south west but this is now obscured by a stand of trees:

Joseph Burtt Davy
1870 - 1940
Our scholar travels yet the loved hill-side

Joseph Burtt Davy died on the 20th August 1940. He spent his latter years living at Shotover Furze in the Ridings. He was a botanist of international renown who started his career in 1891 as a technical assistant at Kew Gardens. In 1892 he moved to the USA , to take up a post in the botany department of the University of California, at Berkley, where he remained for 10 years. He then moved to South Africa where from 1903 to 1913, he was government agrostologist and botanist of Pretoria. He returned to England in 1919 working first at Kew, then in 1925 came to Oxford as lecturer in tropical forest botany at the Imperial Forestry Institute which had been set up in 1924.

A more detailed account of his life and work at Oxford can be found on line at these two locations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Burtt_Davy

http://herbaria.plants.ox.ac.uk/herbaria_pages/daubeny.html


The Memorials of Shotover Hill, Oxfordshire. Copyright © Alan F. Simpson, 2017