Donald McGillivray (botanist)
Australian botanist (1935-2012)

Donald John McGillivray (20 August 1935 – 17 August 2012) in New South Wales, Australia, usually known as D. J. McGillivray, was an Australian botanical taxonomist. He was trained in forestry, and became interested in plant taxonomy just before he transferred in 1964 to the National Herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney.
From 1969 to 1970, he was the Australian Botanical Liaison Officer at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London.
McGillivray specialised in the Grevillea genus and, in 1993, published Grevillea – Proteaceae: A Taxonomic Revision, a definitive scientific survey of the prolific Australian plant genus.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Donald McGillivray (botanist)” is australian botanist (1935-2012). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Donald, McGillivray and botanist, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Donald McGillivray (botanist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.