Gustave Wallis ( 1830 - 1878 )

Travel facilities had improved tremendously with the establishment of new colonial outposts by the middle 1800s ,,and many were the advnatages and oppertunities available to the man adventurous enough to travel to foreigh lands. Such a man was Gustave Wallis .

He was born 1 May 1830 at Luneburg ,near Hanover, Germany , where his father was a judiciary counselor. Young wallis was born with a handicap; he was deaf and mute until six years of age ,and it was 1836 before he could articulate . In fact , a speech defect persisted during his entire life . At about that time the father died , leaving Gustave's mother a widow with six children . With her means of support gone,she found it necessar to leave Luneburg and move to Detmold , her native town. In that romantic and picturesque atmosphere , surrounded by mountains and forests ,Wallis attended school and developed a love of nature and botany which in later years excited a desire in him to see foreign lands , above all, the tropics.

Wallis had great energy and an indomitable will even as a youth ,and in spite of his speech impediment he acquired considerable proficiency in foreign languages , an accomplishment which stood him in good stead during the course of his career . At the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to a goldsmith but ,disliking the work , he quit and became apprenticed to a gardener at Detmold . When his apprenticeship had ended he obtained employment in Munich ,and during that period he frequently made excursions to the Alps where he collected and studied the plants of those craggy regions .

In 1856 wallis was engaged by a famous German firm and went to southern Brazil to start a horticultural establishment . The parent firm went bankrupt , however. The branch establishment was abandoned and Wallis was left stranded , particularly penniles . In 1858 he offered his services to Jean Linden of Brussels ,who accepted them and sent Wallis to South America as a plant collector .He welcomed this opportunity and began a remarkable and hazardous journey , crossing the continet by starting at the mouth of the Amazon River and traversing the total length to its source , exploring that great river and amny of its more important tributaries . In 1870 he was commissioned by James Veitch & Sons to explore the Philippines , his principal objective being to locate various species of Phalaenopsis indigenous to those islands . Though he was able to make enough finds to send a shipment back to England , the mission proved too expensive to be considered very successful ,and Wallis had to be recalled . In 1872,however, he was sent to Colombia, a country already known to him. There he collected many fine tropical plants , including many valuable orchids.

Upon the termination of his contract with the Veitches he continued to collect plants in South Americ a , commencing his last journey at the end of the summer of 1875, when he left to explore the northern and central regions of the island . He was next heard of at Panama , dangerously ill with fever . He recovered ,though ,and commenced work again . His second attack , combined with dysentery ,proved fatal . Letters from the collector Edward Klaboch carried the news that Wallis died in the hospital at Cuenca ,Ecuador , on 20 June 1878.

Many choice plants commemorate Wallis's services to orchidology : Epidendrum wallisii,Epidendrum pseudo-wallisii, Houlletia wallisii, Masdevallia wallisii, and many more.

References

David , Reginald S., and Steiner , Mona Lisa . 1952. Philippine Orchids. New York : The William Frederic Press .

Gardeners' Chronicle . 1878. 10 , no. 241.

Irvin ,R. 1960.The Early Orchid Collectors . The Orch. Rev. 68,no. 803.

Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society . 1948. Vol. 73, part 9.

Lemmon ,Kenneth . 1962. The Covered Garden . London: Museum Press Ltd . van Steenis ,C.G.G. J. 1950.Cyclopaedia of Collectors .Flora Malesiana .Vol. 1, ser.1 .

Veitch ,James H. 1906. Hortus Veitchii,Chelsea , London: James Veitch& Sons Ltd.