Visiting Darwin's Home, Part 2: The Flower Gardens

tags: Sandwalk, Down House, Darwin, nature, photography, London, England, Bromley, England, Professor Steve Steve

Sunday, the day after the Nature Network Science Blog conference was over, Mike, Mo and I caught a train to Bromley, England, where we toured Darwin's Down House and Gardens and walked along the famous Sandwalk that Darwin once walked. This is part two of my photoessay series about Down House, where I focus on the Gardens behind the house. (Since it is the weekend in England, I scheduled this essay to publish an hour later than those that are scheduled to publish during the weekdays).

After touring the Down House, Professor Steve Steve (who can be rather cranky and bossy, no one ever mentioned this to me!) demanded lunch, so we found Mo and went to the Darwin Tea Room to order lunch. It was very crowded -- surprisingly so -- so we sat outside at a damp wooden picnic table under a blue umbrella, but it had stopped raining earlier so it was quite pleasant, in my opinion.

Mike joined us a little while later, after we all had inhaled our food, so we had plenty of time to stare at his lunch, too.

This was the first course of my lunch; egg mayonnaise (egg salad) sandwiches with hot freshly ground and brewed coffee. At first, the coffee looked like it had been contaminated by the "cult of the cow" (milk), but that was just the head that came with it.

Did I mention the sandwiches were delicious?

The second lunch course was a treat I had never tasted before; hot scones, clotted cream and strawberry jam. I almost skipped the scones in favor of something else because I really strongly dislike raisins, especially when they are lurking in my food -- but that would have been a true tragedy because this was the best thing I ate while I was in England. In fact, just looking at the picture as I write this story makes me wish I was there again, eating this ambrosia.

I did catch Professor Steve Steve leering at my scones. This really bothered me because he is supposed to eat bamboo, but my complaints to him to mind his own plate instead of mine went unheeded: Professor Steve Steve wanted to trade his bamboo for my scones!

I inhaled my scones to avoid having to sit on the wicked little bear or unceremoniously dump him onto the wet ground.

Fortified by a good lunch, Mo, Mike, Professor Steve Steve and I wandered off to explore the outdoors areas behind Down House. First, we sought out those experiments of Darwin's that still existed. First, was his "weed garden." In this experiment, Darwin cleared a small patch of sod and recorded the germination and growth of every seed that sprouted there as the cleared area was recolonized.

We later found another of Darwin's experiments, his "worm stone" experiment, in back of the house by a very large tree (this tree was so large that I wondered if perhaps it was young while Darwin was alive and conducting his experiments). The worm stone was a stone that had been placed into the ground so it was level with the surface of the earth. The stone slowly and steadily sank below the earth's surface due to the action of earthworms turning over the soil.

Darwin's data indicated that earthworms caused his worm stone to sink at a rate of 2.2 mm a year. Using these data, he estimated that the action of earthworms on every acre of his land brought some 18 tons of soil to the surface annually.

Next, we turned our attention to the flowers in Darwin's Gardens, which had been restored and were lovingly tended. Darwin loved plants, but he also loved to study them and in fact, it was probably plants, and not finches, that originally helped him formulate many of his thoughts about evolution and the struggle for survival.

Here, I am standing with my back to the house, facing the Gardens that are immediately outside.

The Gardens comprise seven hectares (16 acres) of land behind Down House. This land was very important to Darwin, since he used all of that area to conduct a variety of experiments to formulate, develop and test his ideas. According to my sources, it was mainly due to Darwin's work with plants that gave him the confidence to publish his seminal treatise, On the Origin of Species.

As you can see, Darwin grew a wide variety of flowers as subjects for observation and experiment in his home laboratory (and his greenhouses, which I will show tomorrow). He studied pollination of flowers as well as the "behavior" of plants; how they grow, respond to light, how their branches and roots move along walls, how their tendrils climb walls (which explains the vines growing on the outer walls of Down House), and even what happens when a carnivorous plant devours an insect.

We also tried to get photographs of the busy bumblebees as they pollinated these flowers. I did not capture any images that I liked, but I think both Mo and Mike, with their large oversized camera lenses, managed to get several very nice images.

(While I continue telling you about the Gardens, I will show you pictures of Darwin's flowers, since I love them).

Sadly, I never saw the restored observational apiary with European honeybees in it while I was visiting. I have no idea what happened to it, since I could not find it anywhere, although it was supposed to be in a lab that was built for Darwin (alas, according to my sources, Darwin died before he was able to use that lab).

Incidentally, while writing this photoessay, I ran across a book that is soon to be published by Counterpoint and that will likely interest you: Darwin's Garden: Down House and The Origin of Species by Michael Boulter. Needless to say, I am absolutely fascinated by this book and am determined to get a review copy so I can tell you all about it on my blog.

If you enjoyed reading the second part of this adventure and want to read more, here is Part One.