DAWN L. SANDERS

2. THE WORLD OF DOWNECharles Darwin’s Living Laboratory

INTRODUCTION

Charles Darwin’s achievements are all the moreextraordinary when we reflect on the simple tools anddomestic spaces in which he practised his post-Beagleenquiries. The relatively unchanged garden at DownHouse – with its glasshouse, kitchen-beds, lawn,hedgerows, adjacent woods and meadows – is a livingmonument to the observations, experiments, collectionsand continuous questioning clearly evidenced in hisnotes and letters. This chapter will examine Darwin’s‘living laboratory’ in the context of gardens asscientific spaces – from the experimental garden ofGregor Mendel to contemporary studies of ecologicalpatterns and communities in a Leicestershire suburbangarden. Drawing on Darwin’s correspondence, notebooksand publications it will position Darwin within asocial network of garden experimentation, andassociated fieldwork, by both amateur and professional,male and female, correspondents. These historicalexplorations of Darwin’s ‘locale’ (Kohler, 2011, p.581) will set the scene for contemporary discussions ofDarwin-inspired learning.

DARWIN AND DOWNE

Many of the data for Darwin’s post-Beagle works, and thereflective space for thinking and theorising about theorigin of species, came from active experimentation

Carolyn J. Boulter, Michael J. Reiss & Dawn L. Sanders (eds),Darwin-Inspired Learning, 00–00.© 2014 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

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with weeds, pigeons and various botanical experimentsin his glasshouses or during perambulations in theDowne landscape. Indeed, in the conclusion to On the originof species, Darwin refers to aspects of this locality inhis ‘entangled bank’ metaphor: ‘clothed with manyplants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes,with various insects flitting about, and with wormscrawling through the damp earth’ (Darwin, 1859, p.360). Jones (2009) has identified Downe as ‘TheGalapagos in the Garden of England’ and highlights therich range of experimentation and writing that emergedfrom Darwin’s home in the Kent countryside.

WARDROBES AND CORSETS

Inside his house, Darwin was no stranger to thepossibilities that his wife Emma’s wardrobe, sculleryand body offered his experiments: a whalebone from hercorsets helped him to hypothesise the catapult-likepollinia mechanism on an orchid, clothes pegs assistedin his measurements of the forces involved in plantroot movements, and one of Emma’s hairs was placed on aDrosera leaf as part of his research into theirsensitivity (Darwin, 1875). Human ephemera were asignificant element in Darwin’s experiments; tobaccosmoke was blown on earthworms to gauge their response,‘ a bit of old nail of my toe’1 was positioned on thecommon sundew Drosera rotundifolia, and human urine added tothe list of nitrogenous materials he placed on his‘beloved Drosera’ (Darwin to Hooker, November 26 1860)2

In addition to his influential theory that ‘life is acopiously branching bush, continually pruned by thegrim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of perpetualprogress’ (Gould, 1989, p.35), Darwin’s story hasextensive cultural impacts; one being that no otherindividual has had so much influence on man’sperception of nature (Worster, 1985). These culturalimpacts also concern the practice of science itself, in

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particular ‘indoor’ and ‘outdoor’ science (Outram,1996) and ‘the lab-field border’ (Kohler, 2002, p. 1).

PLACE: THE LAB-FIELD BORDER

A debate concerning the lab-field border emerged duringthe nineteenth century. It was preceded in theeighteenth century by discussions relating to ‘indoor’and ‘outdoor’ science in which the French biologist,Georges Cuvier, was a principal protagonist (Outram,1996). Within this spatial discourse, Darwin’s work atDown House occupies a key juncture in scientificpractice. Kohler (2002) describes the border betweenlaboratory and field science as ‘one of the mostimportant in the cultural geography of modern science’(p.1). He also offers us a significant interpretativedoorway into Darwin’s outdoor scientific work, both inhis garden and the local environs of Downe: Place must figure quite differently in lab and fieldpractices. Laboratory workers eliminate the elementof place from their experiments. Field biologistsuse places actively in their work as tools; they donot just work in a place, as lab biologists do, buton it. Places are as much the object of their workas the creatures in them” (Kohler, 2002, p. 6).

Darwin’s correspondence gives us ample evidence for theimportance of place, on both macro- and micro-scales,as the following extract from a letter to Hookerdemonstrates:My observations, though on so infinitely a small-scale, on the struggle for existence, begin to makeme a little clearer how the fight goes on: out ofsixteen kinds of seed sown in my meadow, fifteenhave germinated, but now they are perishing at sucha rate that I doubt whether more than one willflower. Here we have choking, which has taken placelikewise on a great scale with plant not seedlings,

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in a bit of my lawn allowed to grow up … What awondrous problem it is – what a play of forces,determining the kinds and proportions of each plantin a square yard of turf! It is to my mind trulywonderful. (Darwin to Hooker, June 3 1857)3

Significantly, in relation to Darwin’s correspondencenetworks, Kohler discusses the social identity of laband field biologists and notes that: ‘Labs areseparate, a world apart from the world; nature connectsfield biologists to other social worlds’ (Kohler, ibid,p. 7). This connection to ‘other social worlds’ isclearly exhibited by Darwin’s interactions with hischildren, their governesses, women engaged inscientific practice, gardeners, pigeon-fanciers and thelocal chemist’s son, as well as prominent scientists ofthe day, such as Gray, Hooker and Lyell – connectionsmade through conversation, co-experimentation andcorrespondence.

DARWIN’S WAYS OF WORKING

Charles Darwin observed the living world throughcritical eyes. His extended observations andexperiments, both on the voyage of the Beagle and atDowne, represented nature as multifarious strands ofcompetitive interdependence. Although, as Beer pointsout, Darwin’s ‘descriptions of ‘‘the polity ofnature’’’ give ‘an impression of benign fullness’ evenas they draw attention to ‘loss, failure and struggle’(Beer, 2009, p. 35). These dynamic relationshipspermeated the subsequent literature of the period; bothpoets and novelists drew on the rich imagery of hisideas and extended them to the realms of humaninteraction as demonstrated in the novels of GeorgeEliot (Beer, 2009) Darwin’s carnivorous plant research exemplifies his

critical observations in the field and experimentalinvestigations in his greenhouse. The empirical studies

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conducted in both his house, and garden, were enrichedby a network of global correspondents each exploringideas related to carnivorous plant nutrition, form andfunction. His book Insectivorous plants (1875) continues toinspire the work of modern scientists (e.g. Chase etal., 2009). Charles Darwin first came across Droserarotundifolia while walking in Sussex and was curious as towhy there was such ‘prodigious slaughter’ of insects onits leaves (see Chapter 18). Darwin and his Americancorrespondent Mary Treat (1830-1923) became fascinatedby plant nutrition in relation to these carnivorousplants – both scientists researched a range of plantsexhibiting different trapping mechanisms andcorresponded in such matters over a period of fiveyears (Sanders, 2009/10). Their studies were, in themain, conducted through observation in the field andexperimentation in their homes and gardens. Darwin was particularly interested in a plant

exhibiting animal-like behaviours, as this extract fromAutobiographies (Darwin, Neve & Messenger, 2002) affirms:‘The fact that a plant should secrete, when properlyexcited, a fluid containing an acid and ferment,closely analogous to the digestive fluid of an animal,was certainly a remarkable discovery’ (p.81). At onepoint in his investigations he was said to exclaim, ina letter to Hooker, December 4 1860: ‘By Jove Isometimes think Drosera is a disguised animal’4 MaryTreat wrote detailed essays on carnivorous plants inpopular magazines and in her book Home studies in nature(1885) (see Chapter 22). Like Darwin, she appears tocross the boundary between animal and plant with herdescription of bladderwort Utricularia ‘digestion’: ‘Theselittle bladders are in truth like so many stomachs,digesting and assimilating animal food’ (Treat, 1875 pp.303-304).

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OBSERVATION AND EXPERIMENT

Darwin’s physical range was confined by his poor health– he rarely went further than the ground he could coverin a two- to three-hour walk. Despite theselimitations, the diversity offered by the local flora,fauna and habitats (both semi-natural and human-made)gave him opportunities to make the repeated experimentsand observations needed for his work. In addition, thelocal geological history and patterns of humansettlement with their mixed methods of land managementmeant he could investigate natural communities in timesof continuity and flux; for example, fields laidfallow, retained or changed levels of crop or animalproduction, land drainage methods and subsequentimpacts on extant flora and/or moisture levels. Browne(2003) suggests ‘the power of place’ had a significantinfluence on his scientific interests; ‘Living in theKent countryside, with hop-fields all around, Darwincould not help but notice the twining tendrils thathitched the plants up their wires in the late-Springsunshine’ (Browne, 2003, p. 416). Furthermore, he wasable to conduct and repeat investigations such as hisweed plot experiment. Darwin wanted to know what lifewas like for a seedling plant. He carried out his weed-plot experiment at Down House from January to August1857 (see Chapter 27) whilst investigating the strugglefor existence articulated in his theory of evolution bynatural selection, in On the origin of species (1859).

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Figure 1.Weed-plot experiment (©Sue Johnson)

Weeds are the plants, along with trees, with whichchildren are often most familiar, even in urbanenvironments – dandelion Taraxacum officinale seeds areblown away, cleavers Galium aparine stick to jackets andtrousers. Darwin’s weed- plot experiment brings alivethe everyday dramas of our pavements, walls and backgardens. A patch of common plants becomes a miniaturejungle where the struggle to survive is paramount, andcompetition rife. Darwin saw the struggle for existenceas ruthless, universal and ceaselessly shifting, noless so with seed germination:With plants there is a vast destruction of seeds,but, from some observations which I have made, Ibelieve that it is the seedlings which suffer mostfrom germinating in ground already thickly stockedwith other plants. Seedlings, also, are destroyed invast numbers by various enemies. (Darwin, On the originof species, 1859, p. 54)

Circa 15,000 letters survive from Darwin’s time atDowne and represent a correspondence that extendedacross a global network. The study at Down Houseretains many of Darwin’s original instruments andnotebooks arranged as it would have been in the late

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1850s while he was writing On the origin of species,reconstructed according to evidence provided by aphotograph taken by his son, Leonard. Down Houseretains much original material and the immediatesurrounds of Downe are relatively unchanged – in almostevery case the setting is close to how it was in histime. His life at Down was far from settled or‘humdrum’, as Gillian Beer observes:He was still on his world journeys while he sat inhis armchair, his mind packed with the materialityof the physical world and sharpened by exceptionsnoted. His greenhouse could harbour questions thatunsettled the assumptions of the western world - andhe determined to engage with those questions (Beer,2009, p. xvii)Darwin’s last book The formation of vegetable mould through the

action of worms (1881) drew on his ‘worm-stone’ experiment– using a special mechanism designed by his engineerson Horace to investigate the displacement of soil bythe action of earthworms. This was to be his finalresearch project. English Heritage, an organisationwhich now manages Down House and its garden, reminds us‘by that time he was an internationally acclaimedfigure in the scientific world and yet he was stilldoing simple experiments in his back garden’5. Ofinterest here is the significantly sceptical receptionDarwin’s research on earthworms received in the Britishhorticultural press, more so than On the origin of speciesreceived in the same publications (Elliot, 2010),despite the book capturing the public imagination: ‘aday or two after publication Murray exclaimed ‘‘3,500Worms’’’ (Browne, 2003, p. 490).One of Darwin’s horticultural critics in the matter

of earthworms was David Taylor Fish (1824-1901), headgardener at Hardwicke Hall, Suffolk. In 1881 Fishfinally appears to have accepted Darwin’s evidence ofthe contribution earthworm activity makes to the

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formation of soil, but his description of the earthwormas ‘mean and despised’ distracts the reader from itsrole as a ‘wonderfully efficient drainer’ (Fish inElliot, 2010, p. 71). Prejudicial views of earthwormsas pests persisted in horticultural circles long afterDarwin’s death (Satchell, 1983) and it was not until1949 when Thomas Barrett’s Harnessing the earthworm waspublished that ‘concrete recommendations forencouraging earthworms and using them to make compost’(Elliot, 2010, p. 73) were offered to a gardeningreadership, which had been loathe to accept Darwin’sevidence of their important role in the formation ofvegetable mould and thus fertile soil.

Figure 2. Worm-stone (© Sue Johnson)

SCIENCE IN THE GARDEN

Two of the greatest theories in biological scienceemerged from gardens in nineteenth century Europe.Mendel, ‘the monk in the garden’, working in amonastery in Brno, Moravia delivered his two-partlecture on Certain Laws of Inheritance in 1865 (Henig,2000); Charles Darwin, in his garden in Downe, a smallvillage in Kent, harnessed botany in his constant quest

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to acquire further evidence to support his theories inOn the origin of species (Darwin, 1859). On the surface,Mendel’s story could appear to be that ‘of a gardenerpatiently tending his plants’ (Henig 2000, p.4) but weknow from authors such as Mawer (2006) that Mendel wasboth gardener and meticulous scientist. Mawer detailsMendel’s ‘quantitative observation methods’, usingprecise counting and defined characteristics andavoiding the imprecisely-defined terms ‘size’ and‘appearance’ of his contemporary hybridists (Mawer,2006, p.53). In addition, Mendel was careful to labeland organise his experimental populations of the self-pollinating garden pea Pisum sativum. Indeed, hisscientific use of the term ‘control’ in thisexperimental context was “almost certainly an all-timefirst” (Mawer, 2006, p. 55).Darwin is very much the ‘scientist in the garden’,

constructing his experiments with the assistance ofvarious gardeners, some of whom were borrowed for theirexpertise on specific plants, such as tropical orchids(Elliot, 2010). Browne considers Darwin to be a man who‘loved to puzzle over the quietly complicated lives ofplants’ (Browne, 2003 p. 166). Despite the attentionDarwin heaped on his ‘twitchers, twiners, climbers andscramblers’, his publication on climbing plants ‘didnot catch the public fancy any more than the digestivepowers of Drosera’ (Browne, 2003, p. 417). Both Climbingplants (1865) and Insectivorous plants (1875) were slowsellers amongst popular audiences. However, suchpublications aided the growth of his reputation amongstbotanical scientists such as Gray at Harvard and Hookerin Kew.The greatest contrast between Mendel and Darwin lies

in the dissemination of their work among theirscientific peers and the lack of an accepted languagefor the mechanisms of inheritance revealed by Mendel’sexperiments (Mawer, 2006). While Darwin was amassingpublications and building powerful networks through

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which to develop his scientific discourse, Mendel wasrelatively isolated from the scientific community. Itis this separation that distinguishes their scientific‘personas’ (Daston & Sibum, 2003), not theirinvestigative practice.

LONG-TERM MONITORING

Darwin’s work in his garden, and close to home, followsin the tradition of the Selborne naturalist, GilbertWhite, whose writing he admired (Browne, 2003). Bothmen were passionate observers of the natural world andmade extensive notes of their observations, collectedover many years. Contemporary Britain has JenniferOwen’s thirty-year study of her suburban garden inLeicester, the importance of which Ken Thompson notes,‘is the garden’s ordinariness, coupled with the lengthof the project – three decades – that makes her resultsso valuable’ (Thompson, 2010, p.754). Due partly to thePark Grass Experiment of Lawes and Gilbert, begun in1856 at Rothampstead Research Station - the oldestagricultural research centre in the world - we know theprincipal drivers of vegetational change (Silvertown etal., 2006) and the importance of long-term ecologicalobservations. But, as Silvertown et al. (2010) argue,‘Long-term experiments (LTEs) in particular can revealthe mechanisms that underlie change in communities andecosystem functioning in a way that cannot beunderstood by long-term monitoring alone’ (p.1). Darwinmoved beyond close observation and monitoring andbecame experimenter, theoriser and critic in his own‘locale’ (Kohler, 2011, p. 58). Kohler ascribes theterm ‘locale’ to ‘the connections between doing scienceand living lives’ (2011, p. 581); Keynes makes such aconnection explicit: Life and his science were all of a piece. Working athome on things he could study there, spending everyday with his wife, children and servants, living at

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a time when science meant knowledge andunderstanding in the broadest view, and dwelling onissues that bear directly on the deepest questionsabout what it is to be human, he could not keep histhinking on the natural world apart from feelingsand ideas that were important to him in the rest ofhis life (Keynes, 2002, p. 2).

The weed-plot experiment and his investigative work onplant movement, pollination, cross-fertilisation andinsectivorous plant nutrition often required Darwin tobe at his most ‘patient and foot-slogging best’(Browne, 2003, p. 413). However, his Victorian readerswere seemingly ‘panting for gorillas and cave men’(Browne, 2003, p.194) and felt the author of ‘thecontroversy (On the origin of species) had appeared to strollinto a greenhouse’ (Browne, 2003 p. 194). Perhaps, theinability of humans to notice plants in theirenvironment - a phenomenon described as ‘plantblindness’ (Wandersee & Schussler, 2001) - is not anissue solely confined to the modern era.

CONCLUSION

Darwin was as an eminent scientist who changed ourviews on the evolution of life with the publication ofa book, not only read by scientists but also the widerpopulace. For some, his life is one of the greatestscientific lives ever lived. In this context, Downe andDown House, the place where Darwin spent the majorityof his life, and from which he produced his majorworks, has emerged as a living laboratory. The practiceof pilgrimage is not necessarily restricted toreligious journeys and can equally apply to sites ofscientific importance, as suggested by Sir ArthurKeith: To know Charles Darwin, we must first know Downe.Darwin, quite unwittingly, made these few acres of

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Kent upland an international possession. Down House,then, is a common heritage for truth-seekers of allcountries and all centuries … a permanent sanctuaryfor Darwinian pilgrims. In these gardens, orchards,meadows, and walks were slowly hammered, hot fromfact, new doctrines, which, radiating out from here,permeated to the ends of the earth, giving humanitya new interpretation of living things and of itsrelationship to them. Human thought was forcibly andpermanently thrust from its old time-honoured ruts.(Sir Arthur Keith speaking at the opening of theDarwin Museum, 1929.)In the modern world, Keith’s term ‘a common heritage

for all truth-seekers’ raises a powerful question forthe site and its global relevance. Indeed, Down Houseand its environs could be seen to symbolise not only animportant juncture for scientific praxis, but also thecontinuing discourse of science and faith, which hasimpacted on humanity since Copernicus (and possiblybefore). In this context, the house and itssurroundings occupy a critical position in the historyof human thought. But lying almost inaudibly below thisgrand narrative lies a more intimate story of Darwin asa man who had a ‘most keen feeling’ of the ‘aliveness’of plants (Francis Darwin in Browne, 2003, p.417),whether they grew in a pot in his study, on benches inhis greenhouse, in the garden beds of Down House or inthe woods, fields and ‘entangled’ banks around Downevillage. Their ‘quietly complicated lives’ (Browne,2003, p.166) gave him much material with which to thinkand experiment (Kutschera and Briggs, 2009;Wycoff,2009), so much so that he wrote:It has always pleased me to exalt plants in thescale of organised beings; and I therefore felt anespecial pleasure in showing how many and whatadmirably well adapted movements the tip of a root

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possesses (Darwin, Neve and Messenger, 2002, pp. 82-83)

At a time in human history when our burgeoning

presence increasingly impacts on the tree of life, wewould do well to reflect on Darwin’s view that allorganisms are inter-connected and ‘the relation oforganism to organism the most important of allrelations’ (Darwin, 1859, p.49). His house and garden,and the surrounding landscape, offered manyopportunities to examine such relationships in depthand question how, and why, ‘endless forms mostbeautiful and wonderful have been, and are being,evolved’ (Darwin, 1859, p.360). Drawing inspirationfrom Darwin’s life and science offers young peoplemyriad possibilities to observe biological diversitycloser to home, and experience at first hand, as Darwindid, the continuous struggle for life in the livingworld.

REFERENCES

Beer, G, (2009). Darwin’s plots: evolutionary narrative in Darwin, George Eliot andnineteenth-century fiction. (3rd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Browne, E. J. (1995). Charles Darwin: Voyaging. New York: Alfred Knopf.Browne, E. J. (2003). Charles Darwin: The Power of Place. London: Jonathan

Cape.Chase, M., Christenhuez, M., Sanders, D. and Fay, M. (2009).

Murderous Plants: Victorian Gothic, Darwin and Modern Insights into Vegetable Carnivory. Botanical

Journal of The Linnean Society 161,pp. 329-356.

Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species. (Ed. G. Beer, 2008).Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Darwin, C. (1865). Climbing plants. London: John Murray. Darwin, C. (1875). Insectivorous plants. London: John Murray. Darwin, C. (1881). The formation of vegetable mould through the action of worms.

London: JohnMurray. Darwin, C. (2002). Autobiographies. Neve, M. & Messenger, S. (Eds).

London: Penguin.

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Daston, L. & Sibum, H. O. (2003). Introduction: Scientific personaeand their histories. In Scientific personae: Special issue ofScience in Context 16 (1/2) pp. 1-8.

Desmond, A. J. & Moore, J. (1991). Darwin. London: Michael Joseph.Elliot, B. (2010). Charles Darwin in the British Horticultural Press. Occasional papers

from the RHS Lindley Library. London: Lindley Library Royal Horticultural Society.

Henig, R.M. (2000). The monk in the garden. Boston and New York: HoughtonMifflin.

Jones, S. (2009). Darwin’s island: The Galapagos in the garden of England. London:Little Brown.

Gould, S. J. (1989). Wonderful life: The Burgess shale and the nature of history.London: Hutchinson.

Keynes, R. (2002). Darwin, his daughter and human evolution. New York:Riverhead Books.

Kohler, R. (2012). Practice and place in twentieth-century fieldbiology: a comment. Journal of the History of Biology 45, pp. 579-586.

Kohler, R. (2002). Landscapes and labscapes: exploring the lab-field border inbiology. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Kutschera, U. & Briggs, W.R. (2009). From Charles Darwin’s botanicalcountry-house studies to modern plant biology. Plant Biology 11, pp.785-795.

Mawer, S. (2006). Gregor Mendel: Planting the seeds of genetics. Abrams : NewYork.

Outram, D. (1996). New spaces in natural history, in cultures of natural history.Jardine, N., Secord, A. & Spary, E. (Eds). Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Sanders, D. (2009/10). Behind the curtain: Treat and Austin’scontributions to Darwin’s work on insectivorous plants andsubsequent botanical studies. Jahrbuch für Europäische Wissenschaftskultur,Bd.5, pp. 285-298.

Satchell, J. E. (1983). Earthworm biology: from Darwin to vermiculture. London:Chapman and Hall.

Silvertown, J., Tallowin, J., Stevens, C., Power,S., Morgan, V.,Emmett, B., Hester, A., Grime, P., Morecroft, M., Buxton, R.,Poulton, P., Jinks, R. & Bardgett, R. (2010). Environmental myopia:a diagnosis and a remedy. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 25, 10, pp. 556-561.

Silvertown, J., Poulton, P., Johnston, E., Edwards, G., Heard, M.& Biss, P. (2006). The park grass experiment 1856-2006: itscontribution to ecology. Journal of Ecology 94, 4, pp. 801-814.

Thompson, K. (2010). Ecology begins at home. The Garden Nov, pp. 754-755.

Treat, M. (1875). Plants that eat animals. Gardeners’ Chronicle 6 March,pp.303-304.

Treat, M. (1885). Home studies in nature. New York: American Book Company.Wandersee, J. H. & Schussler, E. E. (2001). Toward a theory of plant

blindness. Plant Science Bulletin 47(1), pp. 2-9. Worster, D. (1985). Nature’s economy: a history of ecological ideas. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

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Wycoff, M. (2009). Scholar’s Dilemma: ‘Green Darwin’ vs. ‘PaperDarwin’, an interview with David Kohn. Evolution Education Outreach 2,pp.101-106.

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1 (Cambridge University Library MS DAR 54:29)2 http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-2999 accessed on Thursday Nov 28 20133 http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-2101 accessed on Monday November 25 20134 http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-3008 accessed on Thursday November 28 20135 (http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/home-of-charles-darwin-down-house/garden/open-

air-laboratory/)

Dawn L. SandersInstitute of Pedagogical, Curricular and Professional Studies,Gothenburg University, Sweden