Daniel Bolton, army officer and plant collector, became a second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers in 1811. He served in the Peninsular War (1811-1814), in Holland (1814-1815), France (1815-1816) and Canada (from about 1818). In 1846 he was posted to Auckland, New Zealand, where he joined Governor George Grey. That same year he was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel and subsequently to Colonel in 1854, and Major-General in 1859.

In 1853 he followed Governor Grey to the Cape Colony and remained until his death in 1860. He travelled via Sydney and Melbourne to England before arriving at the Cape in May 1855. While stationed in Grahamstown he was in command of the Royal Engineers at its headquarters for the Eastern District. During these years he collected plants and according to P. MacOwan*, in an address to the Albany Natural History Society in 1867, covered the district thoroughly. He sent packages of succulent specimens to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, London, and also sent plants to W.H. Harvey* in Dublin. He is commemorated in the name of the orchid species Bonatea boltonii. Harvey acknowledged his contributions of plants from the neighbourhood of Grahamstown in the preface to Volume 1 of the Flora Capensis (1860).

Early in 1856 Bolton became a member of the Grahamstown Literary, Scientific and Medical Society. He left on retirement shortly after suffering a stroke and died in Cape Town.

List of sources:

Cape of Good Hope almanac and annual register, 1856, 1857.

Grahamstown Journal, 15 March 1856, p. 2, "Literary, Scientific and Medical Society"; 11 October 1867, p. 3, "Albany Natural History Society".

Gunn, M. & Codd, L.E. Botanical exploration in southern Africa. Cape Town: Balkema, 1981.

Harvey, W.H. & Sonder, O.W. Flora Capensis, being a systematic description of the plants of the Cape Colony, Caffraria, and Port Natal (Vol. 1). Ashford, Kent: Lovell Reeve, 1894 (originally published 1860).

JSTOR Global Plants: Bolton, Daniel. Retrieved on 18 September 2023 from https://plants.jstor.org/stable/10.5555/al.ap.person.bm000045889

Compiled by: C. Plug

Last updated: 2023-09-18 14:52:03