Signs of Spring

This morning it was a promisingly Spring-like and perfect for a drive to Kent to see Down House, the home of Charles Darwin. It was purchased in 1996 by English Heritage and restored and furnished to match photographs and descriptions of how the home would have looked like while the Darwin family were living there.

I really enjoyed wandering through the garden seeing signs of Spring, and walking down Darwin's Sandwalk. He often went around this circular walk 5 times to complete a mile, and kept a count of how many laps were completed by kicking over each of the five flint stones at the beginning of the walk on each lap. It's said that his children liked to play tricks and would sometimes replace the stones so that their father would walk further than usual. Dave and I loved that we had Darwin's famously meditative walk to ourselves, funnily the crowds stayed indoors on the house tour and taking a break at the tearooms.

If you look very closely at the junction between the two paths here, you can see the five flints all lined up in a row...

Most of Darwin's experiments were devised and performed by himself at Down House and they were brilliant in their simplicity - from the weed garden (counting the proportion many seedlings grew and survived on a bare patch of ground over 8 months), to feeding carnivorous plants, to putting seeds in salt water for a month to see if they could survive the treatment, in which case they could potentially travel by ocean currents; to an interesting idea that the number of cats could affect the number of red clover plants in an area (it's to do with cats eating field mice, which plunder bumblebee nests, while bumblebees are pollinators of the red clover plant...)

His greenhouse and garden were all part of his natural laboratory.