Charles Darwin's Garden

The family garden that fostered Darwin's ground-breaking discoveries about the nature of evolution and man's place in the world.

A highly illustrated and beautiful book by Darwin's direct descendent.Charles Darwin and his wife Emma moved to Down House in Kent in 1842 after he had completed his voyage round the world in HMS Beagle.

He lived there for the rest of his life, devoting forty years to the creation of a unique 19th century garden.Down is a garden remarkable not for its grandeur but for how Darwin used it.

It is the garden of a man whose historic work would transform our understanding of the world forever.

The seeds for his discovery of the ground-breaking theory of evolution were sown during the voyage of the Beagle, but it was at Down that he developed his ideas and found much of the evidence that he was to set out in `The Origin of Species'.Darwin's was a family garden of lawns, kitchen gardens and hothouses, orchard, meadow and copse.

It was a garden for all seasons, providing flowers, vegetables and fruit throughout the year - including 54 varieties of gooseberry, as Darwin noted with pride.

He kept fancy pigeons and was fascinated by earthworms in the soil.

Every day he walked on his `thinking path' round the Sand-walk copse and his rapt observations of wild-life in the hedgerows prompted insights that lie at the heart of our contemporary understanding of the natural world.A unique book, richly illustrated with previously unpublished materials drawn from the family archive.