Readers’ wildlife photos

Today we have the first part of a series of photos taken at Down House, where Darwin lived most of his life. The photographer is Neil K. Dawe, who lives on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Neil’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Down House, Kent, UK

On our UK trip this past June, we stopped at a special place, Down House, where we spent some time wandering through the home and grounds of Charles Darwin. The house has been carefully preserved and we spent some time on the upper floor, essentially an exhibition of his life. There we saw a number of Darwin artifacts such as some of the equipment and reference books he took with him on the Beagle voyage, some of his notebooks, as well as manuscript pages from On the Origin of Species.

Darwin purchased the house on 22 July 1842 for £2,200 and moved in that September. He described it as “… a good, very ugly house with 18 acres, situated on a chalk flat, 560 feet above sea. There are peeps of far distant country and the scenery is moderately pretty: its chief merit is its extreme rurality. I think I was never in a more perfectly quiet country”:

The downstairs includes a number of rooms that are laid out much as Darwin and Emma, his wife, had left them, including Darwin’s study, where he wrote On the Origin of Species. We walked through the study, which has been restored to the original 1870s arrangement with original furniture and many of Darwin’s possessions. Since photographs are not allowed in the home I have included the following image of his study by Anthonyeatworld, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, Cropped from the original:

Later, we wandered through the estate gardens to visit the vegetable garden (on the right of the photo) and Darwin’s greenhouse and cloches where he conducted many of his experiments. After completing construction of the heated greenhouse, Darwin requested plants from Kew Gardens and upon their arrival he notes in a letter to J.D. Hooker, “I am fairly astounded at their number! why my hot-house is almost full!. . . I have not yet even looked out their names; but I can see several things which I wished for, but which I did not like to ask for.”:

The greenhouse, where Darwin carried out many of his experiments, was fully stocked during our visit:

A Pitcher Plant (likely Nepenthes spp.) in the greenhouse; Nepenthes was included in a list of nursery plants Darwin planned to purchase:

Another greenhouse plant, an orchid, likely from the genus Lycaste:

We then wended our way over to the Sandwalk. Darwin leased 1.5 acres in 1846 from Sir John Lubbock, planted it with hazel, birch, privet, and dogwood, and created the gravel path. Francis Darwin recalled that “The Sand-walk was our play-ground as children, and here we continually saw my father as he walked round.” Huxley also spoke of “… the famous Sandwalk, where Darwin used to take his allotted exercise after each spell of work, freshening his mind and shaping his thought for the task in hand.” Darwin used stones to count laps, kicking one aside each time he passed, to avoid interrupting his thoughts as he walked his “thinking path.”:

Here I’m walking along the Sandwalk in the footsteps of Charles Darwin, birding as I go.  From Darwin’s notes: “Hedge-row in sand-walk planted by self across a field (years ago when I held field which had from time immemorial been ploughed & 3 or 4 years before the Hedge was planted, had been left as pasture — soil plants, chiefly Hard or clayed & very poor.— . . . plants, have now sprung up in hedge — preserves how the seeds having been brought by birds, for all are esculent & the protection afforded by spinose thorns — a sort of common land—” Photo: Renate Sutherland.

Part 2 to follow.