May, 1917-] THE ORCHID REVIEW. 99 
PITS 
HE following interesting account of Mr. John Day’s fine collection of 
Orchid Drawings, which has been frequently mentioned in our pages, 
is taken from the Kew Bulletin (1906, pp. 177-179) :-— 
In September, 1902, Mrs. Wolstenholme, of High Cross, Tottenham, 
sister of Mr. John Day, well-known during his life-time as an amateur 
grower of Orchids, presented to Kew the very valuable collection of 
drawings of cultivated Orchids made by that gentleman. Mrs. Wolsten- 
holme had previously bequeathed the collection to Kew, but felt that she 
was delaying its usefulness by keeping it in her possession. As delivered at 
Kew, it consisted of 53 oblong books of about 90 pages each, with a 
complete index. The books have since been bound in 17 volumes, and 
they contain approximately 3,000 coloured drawings, with about 500 in 
sepia, besides copious original notes and a large number of cuttings from 
the Gardener’s Chronicle and other papers relating to Orchids. We have 
not succeeded in finding any published biography of the author, and only a 
few scattered facts concerning his life and his collections. But Mrs. 
Wolstenholme has communicated the following particulars :— 
John Day was born on February 3rd, 1824, in London, where his 
father, a city merchant, resided*antil 1840, when the family removed to a 
pleasant old house in Tottenham. After his father’s death in 1851 he 
continued to live at the old house, and from there he married in 1853, but, 
losing his wife in 1857, he sold the old home, and joined Mr. and Mrs. 
Wolstenholme at High Cross, Tottenham, the present residence of Mrs. 
Wolstenholme. Thither, in 1858, he removed his large collection of 
cultivated ferns, to which he had for some years devoted much attention. 
Shortly afterwards he took up the cultivation of Orchids. He built suitable 
houses, and soon filled them with valuable plants. In course of time his 
collection became one of the richest and most famous of the period. Then 
his health broke down, and he visited the Mediterranean countries, which 
gave him a zest for travelling to more remote places, and he subsequently 
went to India, Ceylon, Brazil, and Jamaica. In 1881, previous to these 
longer journeys, his collection of Orchids was brought to the hammer, and 
realised £7,000. Three plants of Cypripedium Stonei var. platyteanium 
fetched over £400. Subsequently he again became a collector of living 
Orchids, chiefly of rare and curious kinds. But latterly he devoted much 
attention to the dried ferns he had collected on his travels. He died on 
January 15th, 1888, and his second collection of Orchids was sold in May 
of the same year, when a small plant of the Cypripedium mentioned above 
brought the sum of £159 I2s. 
ES MR. JOHN DAY'S ORCHID DRAWINGS. 
