John Day (botanist)
Encyclopedia
Day was born in the City of London
City of London
The City of London is a small area within Greater London, England. It is the historic core of London around which the modern conurbation grew and has held city status since time immemorial. The City’s boundaries have remained almost unchanged since the Middle Ages, and it is now only a tiny part of...
in 1824, the son of a wealthy wine merchant. He bought his first collection of orchids in 1852 at an auction of the stock of Loddiges
Loddiges
The Loddiges family managed one of the most notable of the eighteenth and nineteenth century plant nurseries that traded in and introduced exotic plants, trees, shrubs, ferns, palms and orchids into European gardens....
nursery upon its closure. At an average price of £1 each, he acquired 50 tropical orchids, not the more common Cymbidiums, but Dendrobiums from India, Odontoglossums from tropical America, Lycastes, and Cattleyas, which he grew under ideal conditions in an orchid house built with an exemplary heating system, in the grounds of his home at High Cross, Tottenham.
Between 1863 and 1888 at the height of orchid mania
Orchidelirium
Orchidelirium is the name given to the Victorian era of flower madness when collecting and discovering Orchids reached extraordinarily high levels. Wealthy orchid fanatics of the 19th century sent explorers and collectors to almost every part of the world in search of new varieties of orchids....
in Victorian
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
England, John Day painted and sketched orchids from his own collection in Tottenham
Tottenham
Tottenham is an area of the London Borough of Haringey, England, situated north north east of Charing Cross.-Toponymy:Tottenham is believed to have been named after Tota, a farmer, whose hamlet was mentioned in the Domesday Book; hence Tota's hamlet became Tottenham...
, London nurseries, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and visited the tropics to see orchid habitat at first hand. A large number of his illustrations depict plants he had coaxed into flower and are the first-known images of species. He maintained close links with Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach
Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach
Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach was an ornithologist, botanist and the foremost German orchidologist of the 19th century...
, the orchid taxonomist at the University of Hamburg
University of Hamburg
The University of Hamburg is a university in Hamburg, Germany. It was founded on 28 March 1919 by Wilhelm Stern and others. It grew out of the previous Allgemeines Vorlesungswesen and the Kolonialinstitut as well as the Akademisches Gymnasium. There are around 38,000 students as of the start of...
.
In 2004 Thames and Hudson published a collection of John Day's artwork in A Very Victorian Passion: The Orchid Paintings of John Day by Phillip Cribb and Michael Tibbs, two leading authorities on Orchidaceae
Orchidaceae
The Orchidaceae, commonly referred to as the orchid family, is a morphologically diverse and widespread family of monocots in the order Asparagales. Along with the Asteraceae, it is one of the two largest families of flowering plants, with between 21,950 and 26,049 currently accepted species,...
, who provide a detailed review of the history, background, and botany of the orchids depicted.
This botanist is denoted by the author abbreviation J.Day when citing
Author citation (botany)
In botanical nomenclature, author citation refers to citing the person who validly published a botanical name, i.e. who first published the name while fulfilling the formal requirements as specified by the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature...
a botanical name
Botanical name
A botanical name is a formal scientific name conforming to the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature and, if it concerns a plant cultigen, the additional cultivar and/or Group epithets must conform to the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants...
.