Beuzeville, Wilfred Alexander Watt de   (1884 - 1954)

De Beuzeville was born at Aston Station, Bombala, N.S.W., on 13 February 1884 and died at Kiama, in the same State, on 28 March 1954.

He started work in a solicitor's office but preferred an outdoor life and soon took a job on a local property, later leasing 'Billapaloola', which subsequently became one of the largest and best of the pine plantations of the Forestry Commission of New South Wales. Early in 1912 he joined the Forest Service of the State and was located at Warialda and late in 1914 promoted to the newly created position of forest assessor, his first task being the survey and assessment of the Pilliga forest. In 1920 he was placed in charge of the Tumut Forestry District, where he was responsible for the establishment of many new pine plantations. In collaboration with the Principal of the Tumut District School a section of one of the plantations was set aside as a School Forest – one of the first in the State.

At the beginning of 1928 he was transferred to Head Office; from 1930-33 his services were made available to the Forest Products Division, CSIR, for the collection of botanical and timber specimens. E. H. F. Swain who was then Commissioner of Forests, had studied the effect of climate on the forests of Queensland and had devised a system of classification of climates into various zones. The continuation of this work was handed over to de Beuzeville and one of the results was the publication The Climatological Basis of Forestry. Towards the end of his official career (he retired on 3 July 1948) he wrote the book Australian Trees for Australian Planting, but it was not published until 1953.

From 1930 to 1935 he collected extensively for Maiden at the National Herbarium in Sydney and for Herbert Dadswell's group at the CSIR (as CSIRO was known then) Division of Forest Products in Melbourne. According to the CSIR logs, by the end of 1935 he had provided 1048 specimens for Dadswell's group out of the entire collection of 3374 specimens, almost a third of the collection! Dadswell's group began logging samples in December 1928 and had reached 1431 by the time de Beuzeville started in November of 1930. He sent 56 shipments, almost one a month, averaging 20 samples per shipment for the next five years, which was well over half the samples received during this period.

De Beuzeville was essentially an ecologist and botanist and was highly regarded by his associates in those fields. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1919 and later of the Linnean Society in the same State. He contributed a number of papers to the respective journals, some of them being in collaboration with M. B. Welch. His extensive collections of eucalypt specimens are mainly located at the, National Herbarium, Sydney or at the Division of Forest Research, CSIRO, Canberra. (now Australian National Herbarium, CANB).

Source: Extracted from:
Hall, N. (1978) Botanists of the Eucalypts. CSIRO, Melbourne.
https://www.foresthistory.org.au/newsletter/afhsnewsletter80.pdf
Portrait Photo: https://www.foresthistory.org.au/newsletter/afhsnewsletter80.pdf