Walter Davis

Walter Davis (14 September 1847 – 18 November 1930) was an English At 12 years old, he left school and started work in the gardens of the Marquess of Winchester at Amport House; the house had been rebuilt in 1857, and the gardens were being re-modelled. He then moved to Wilton Park Gardens, at Beaconsfield where he stayed for four years, rising to the rank of departmental foreman. In 1873, following the departures of George Downton and A. R. Endres, Harry Veitch was looking for a plant collector to travel to South America to locate and collect a quantity of the orchid, Masdevallia veitchiana, which had been introduced to England in 1867, following its discovery by Richard Pearce but was still scarce. and, like his predecessor Gustav Wallis he traversed the continent, travelling the entire length of the Amazon River. and the golden-yellow M. davisii (the Incas' Qoriwaqanki or "golden waqanki"), which Davis discovered in the vicinity of Cusco, Peru. He sent flowers to Heinrich Reichenbach for identification; in The Gardeners' Chronicle, Reichenbach described this new species as "M. davisii", saying:

"This is a beautiful thing, much like M. harryana and veitchiana.... The other parts of the flower are yellowish, white and of the deepest splendid orange inside; so that it would appear to give a most welcome contrast in a group of the scarlet and vermillion and white Masdevallias. It was discovered by a, most probably new collector, Mr. W. Davis... I have a very good opinion of this collector, who was introduced to me by a set of new dried Orchids; so I thought it my duty to attach the name of such a promising collector to such a welcome Masdevallia."

Near Arequipa in Peru, he also discovered a new species of tuberous begonia, Begonia davisii, which was also named after him. B. davisii was later used in the early days of breeding Begonia × tuberhybrida cultivars by John Seden in the Veitch Nurseries at Coombe Wood.

Return to England On his return to England in 1877, Davis was selected to conduct a botanical analysis of herbage on the experimental plots at Rothamsted.

Later life Davis continued to work for James Veitch & Sons until the dissolution of the business in 1914, after which he became secretary to the Geological Society and then the Royal Geographical Society.