(bright upbeat music)
- My name is Antony O'Rourke.
I'm head gardener at Down House, the home of Charles Darwin.
And welcome to this virtual tour
of our beautiful gardens today.
This is the home that Charles Darwin
shared with his wife, Emma,
from the autumn of 1842 until his death in 1882,
and it's where they raised their large family.
Charles and Emma Darwin both came
from very privileged backgrounds,
and when they first came here to view the house,
they were very, very unimpressed.
At this stage in his career,
he'd already garnered the reputation
as a well-respected geologist, and when he came here,
it was not the house that impressed him,
but it was the landscape.
It was here that he recognized it was where the London clay
met the chalk of the North Kent Downs.
This was incredibly important
because it meant he was able to establish
a viable productive kitchen garden
to feed the workers and his family, but also it meant
that he could do his really important research.
Shortly after moving to Down House in 1842,
the Darwins set about lowering the road
at the front aspect of the property.
In addition to this, they also built a six-foot wall
because at this stage in his career,
he was already a respected geologist
and was very well known, and this would've given the privacy
that the Darwin family so greatly appreciated.
Now, the spoil from the road
was used to carry out landscaping within the gardens,
such as the mound here,
which is currently ablaze with azaleas.
These particular azaleas were Emma Darwin's favorite
and are incredibly fragrant.
The scent is really pervading the air at the moment.
She would've had these planted throughout the garden
so she could enjoy that beautiful fragrance
at this time of the year.
(birds chirping)
The gardens also contain rhododendrons
donated by his good friend Joseph Hooker.
Joseph Hooker was the director
of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew,
and he'd collected these plants
on his expedition to the Himalaya.
The day-to-day running of the garden
was very much the responsibility of Charles's wife, Emma.
She had a very informal style, and this is reflected
in the very naturalistic planting here.
And some of these plants include
perennial cornflowers, lupins,
and the Pheasant's Eye narcissus in the foreground there.
Darwin really was the antithesis
of the archetypal Victorian father,
and his children later recall in their memoirs
of a very warm and happy childhood.
And the stage for this would've been here
on the veranda and this lawn.
Darwin would've lay under the trees
and listened to the buzzing of the bees
in the lime trees overhead
while his children played with perhaps a rabbit,
or a cat, or a dog.
And this warm family home
was this very sort of domestic family setting
of this period of incredible
scientific endeavor and discovery.
The gardens here have been lovingly restored
by English Heritage to reflect how they would've been
when the Darwin's lived here.
Some of the planting, however,
like this old veteran mulberry tree, is original,
and the children recall climbing through its branches
from the upstairs nursery down into the garden
in order to play.
The garden here and the surrounding countryside
was Darwin's living landscape laboratory
and formed the physical setting
for all of Darwin's research.
Take for example this experiment here on the lawn.
This is one of the very first ecological studies
ever carried out.
Darwin concluded that in the absence of grazing,
the coarser plants took over
and choked out the weaker plants,
and this led to a reduction in species number.
In the 1850s, Darwin commissioned a local carpenter
to build him a glasshouse
in which he could grow carnivorous plants, orchids,
and climbing plants for his botanical studies.
The tropical section of this glasshouse
would've been heated by coal,
which was fed through an exterior hopper
by of course the gardeners.
This would've heated hot water pipes,
which would've kept the temperature in here
above 18 degrees, essential for growing tropical plants.
Darwin was especially fascinated
by a tiny little bog plant called Drosera,
which grew in the local bogs at Keston,
and he studied this plant, and fed it various food stuffs,
and was able to come to the conclusion
that it was indeed what he called insectivorous.
Today, of course, we use the term carnivorous
because we know that plants can consume and digest
various animals, not just insects,
but some of them in the tropics
have been known to eat mice and even rats.
The vast majority of the world's orchids
are what we call epiphytic,
which means that they grow on the trunks of other plants.
This enables them the evolutionary advantage
of having access to light, access to pollinators,
and access to wind to disperse their seeds.
One such orchid is the flamboyant cattleya orchid,
which grows high up in the canopy
in tropical rainforests of South America.
One of the climbers that he studied was the Bignonia plant,
which he observed had tendrils
which grew away from the light.
He concluded that this was an evolutionary adaptation
in helping the plant cling to its support.
Darwin initially described the kitchen garden
as a detestable slip of land,
but he really did feel it would be productive.
And it was here where they grew all of the vegetables
which would've been used in the kitchen,
but they also grow herbs such as medicinal herbs
and also culinary herbs like this sweet cicely
with its aromatic foliage smelling of sort of sweet aniseed.
Unlike today, vegetables from the Victorian kitchen garden
would've been strictly seasonal only,
but when they grew, they came as a glut,
like this asparagus.
Back in Darwin's day, these would've fed the family,
but today they benefit our visitors,
and these are going to the tea room.
(birds chirping)
The kitchen garden is also home to plants like this cardoon,
which although today is grown as an ornamental,
back in the Victorian period
the stems would've been blanched as a vegetable.
My job as head gardener is very varied.
Not only maintaining and restoring the gardens
as the Darwins would've known them,
but also maintaining and enhancing
these flower-rich habitats and the countryside around.
This would've been Darwin's living landscape laboratory.
Thank you for joining me
at the beautiful house and gardens of Charles Darwin.
We look forward to seeing you in the near future.
If you want to know more, visit our website.
(gate clanking)
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