Humphrey Morrison Burkill

Humphrey Morrison Burkill OBE (8 December 1914 – 12 July 2006), was a director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens from 1957 to 1969.

Early life and education Burkill was born to Isaac Henry Burkill and Ethel Maud Morrison on 8 December 1914 in the Director's House on the grounds of the gardens of the Singapore Botanic Gardens. When Burkill was four, he was put in the care of a family from Yorkshire, and attended a preparatory school when he was eight. He attended Repton School when he was thirteen, and later attended Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He studied in the University of Cambridge and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1936. He received his postgraduate degree in crop husbandry in 1939. He was offered work at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew to revise Useful Plants of West Tropical Africa, which was written by J. M. Dalziel and published in 1937.