Orchid

Holden was employed to create botanical illustrations by the Duke of Devonshire’s head gardener, Joseph Paxton. Holden created a plate from the bucket orchid watercolour, which appears in lithographic form in volume five of Paxton’s publication Paxton’s Magazine of Botany (1838). Paxton writes that the Coryanthes macrantha’s first flowered in Chatsworth in 1837, the same year in which Holden completed his study. This haste to picture the plants reveals a desire to be the first to claim ownership of a particular species. The botanical magazines, where prints of the orchids appeared, acted as a stage upon which wealthy plant-owners could exhibit their exotic plants and generate public interest in them, asserting their position in the world of fashionable botany.