Charles Samuel Pollock Parish 1822-1897

Charles Samuel Pollock Parish (1822 – 1897) wasn´t a botanist, but invaluable for the orchidologists of that time John Lindley and Joseph Dalton Hooker. Charles Samuel Pollock Parish was born in Calcutta, India at the 26.02.1822, He was educated at Oxford University,where he graduated in 1841 and took the Bachelor of Arts. 1852 he was sent to Moulmein, Burma as a chaplain.
That was the time Reverend Charles Samuel Pollock Parish became interested in orchids, first to decorate his missonary garden, but then he started to collect orchids. In 1859 he and Colonel Robson Benson ,an officer in the British army in India, been sending 6 big cases full with rare orchids to England, one of the cases was meant for Kew Royal Botanical Gardens.

Unfortunatly this botanical treasure boxes sunk in the Ganges. Parish was very dissappointed, many of that rare orchids he could never find again, but Parish kept on to sent his collected orchids to England, where they been received by the famous botanists John Lindley and Joseph Dalton Hooker. Both praised Parish and named a lot of orchids in honour to him, like Phalaenopsis parishii, Paphiopedilum parishii, Cymbidium parishii or Dendrobium parishii (named by Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach). Charles Samuel Pollock Parish was also a talented painter and illustrator. In 1871 Parish went to England with a huge collection of his drawings and presented them to the Kew Royal Botanical Gardens. In 1878 Charles Parish retired from the mission work and returned back to England, where he died quietly in sleep at the age of 75 at his home at Roughmoor, Somerset.