Publisher's Synopsis
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 40 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.;This is an authoritative account of his time there.
