Remembering Colin Burrows
The nationally critical Pimelea mimosa, one of the many native daphnes described by by Colin. Photo: Jeremy Rolfe.
Dr Colin Burrows, ecologist, paleoecologist, biosystematist and conservationist has passed away after a brief illness.
Colin Burrows first started his career undertaking an M.Sc. study on three Pimelea growing near the Mt Cass Field Station, Canterbury. His work resulted in the formal description of Pimelea oreophila and P. pulvinaris in one of his first papers published in 1962 in the Transactions of the Royal Society of New Zealand (Botany). Always a keen mountaineer and observer, Colin collected plants widely throughout the mountains of the eastern South Island particularly, and always had an eye for the unusual. Despite an 'accidental' start into taxonomy, Colin soon switched to ecology for his PhD, from which he started his career as lecturer at the University of Canterbury in 1960 (retiring from there officially in 1993). In that position Colin oversaw the supervision of numerous future botanists and university academics and from there he also established himself as an expert on New Zealand Quaternary Sciences for which he was eventually awarded a D.Sc. He was renowned for his in depth knowledge of the indigenous flora and vegetation of New Zealand, for his research into alpine grasslands, wetlands, forests and glacial phenomena. He dabbled in lichens, pedology and even became an early expert on the diet of moa. He was the botanist for Arthur’s Pass National Park and wrote a wide body of work on the germination behaviour of New Zealand plant species. In his later years Colin decided to revisit Pimelea, a taxonomically 'tricky' genus. As a result he added 35 new taxa to our flora though this was only after he completed a seminal work on Julius von Haast (published 2005) and helped edit the third revision of the Natural History of Canterbury (published 2008). In his later life Colin received the Loder Cup (2010) of which he was immensely proud.
Colin is remembered fondly by many as an excellent mentor and a very humble man. He was the quiet one who sat at the back and politely came up to you afterward to suggest alternatives to your scientific reasoning. He was also very old school, writing manuscripts by hand, or on a type writer, he eschewed computers, and never had email. Peter de Lange worked with Colin briefly on Pimelea, during which time he recalls being sent manuscripts that his daughter Julia had typed up, often these had maps drawn by hand and coloured in with pencil. He says “While we did not always see eye to eye on that difficult genus, together we described the Northland endemic Pimelea acra and I was able to present Colin with a range of entities, many of which he subsequently described."
During his retirement from Canterbury University, he was a major contributor to and driving force behind the Quail Island/Otamahua Restoration Trust that is working to restore the native vegetation on Quail Island in Lyttelton Harbour.
The family have asked that instead of sending flowers, people make donations to the Quail Island Restoration Trust.