12 - Darwin’s Botany in the Origin of Species

Summary

He moons about in the garden, and I have seen him standing doing nothing before a flower for ten minutes at a time. If he only had something to do, I really believe he would be better.

- Charles Darwin’s gardener

DARWIN’S BOTANY: INTRODUCTION

Taxon-based studies defined much of natural history in the nineteenth century, with botany and zoology serving as the two major realms of such inquiry. Darwin himself was taxonomically promiscuous, flitting from organism to organism much as his curiosity dictated but also out of a utilitarian need for particular examples to support a generalizable theory that explained the diversity of living organisms. Thus, in the course of his scientific career Darwin studied a range of organisms and familiarized himself with related sciences like geography and geology. But increasingly after the Origin, his lifelong interest in botany not only revealed itself but came to dominate his research.

That interest had started early. In fact, one could say that he inherited it; his grandfather Erasmus was a translator of Linnaeus, while another relative, John Wedgewood, was one of the founders of the Royal Horticultural Society. Almost serving as a prophetic image of the role that botany would play in his life, an early portrait of the young Charles shows him seated next to his sister Catherine holding a pot of plants.