[2] Bury grew up in Lancashire, England and was the daughter of a rich Liverpool merchant whose estate resided outside the city at Fairfields.
Growing up, Bury drew each plant species that held her interest and claimed that she was "raised in the greenhouses of her family home” which was later demolished in 1913.
She had no pretensions as to scientific knowledge and, in effect, was a very talented amateur that created aquatint engravings with original hand-coloring.
By 1829, (age 30) she had produced a number of paintings of hexandrian plants, which she wished to publish and later became a venture promoted by her friend, William Swainson.
Between 1852 and 1860 the family lived at Hillsborough Hall near Sheffield and later moved to Croft Lodge, Ambleside in the Lake District.
Her later work after 1836 consisted of eight plates for Maund and Henslow's The Botanist[9] and photographs of her drawings were included in Figures of Remarkable Forms of Polycystins, or Allied Organisms, in the Barbados Chalk deposit in 1860–1861, followed by new expanded editions in 1865 and 1869.