Erasmus Darwin, from The Temple of Flora, by Robert Thornton, 1810

We’re all heard of Charles Darwin, and indeed the last couple of blogs have been about one impact of his ideas on evolution, but who knows much about his grandfather?

I certainly didn’t until I chanced across something he’d written which made me think I ought to find out a bit more about him. Somewhat to my surprise  I discovered  that he was  at least as multi-talented as the more famous Charles and, in his own way, almost as important.

Erasmus Darwin  was not only a man of extraordinary intellectual insight with his own pioneering ideas on evolution, he was a successful doctor, an inventor, a “lunartick” scientist, gardener, botanist and   later in life he became the most famous poet of his day.  Often accused of atheism he also had radical views  neither of which was  a good idea during the wars with revolutionary France at the very end of the 18thc.

The result has been that  for the last 150 years he has largely been overshadowed his grandson, and, I think,  unfairly so.

Darwin’s visiting card

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The cover of Amazing Stories, Sept 1927

The man-eating tree from Madagascar I wrote about last week turned out to be an elaborate hoax, albeit a very long lasting and successful one. Nevertheless it struck a chord in the public imagination and from then on there has been a constant stream of stories about weird plants gobbling up humans from all round the world.

From Amazing Man, Oct 1939

But is  a man-eating plant or a sentient plant capable of moving actually even theoretically possible?  Although the science says pretty clearly “no”,  quite a lot of people seem to have think it is… if only in their imagination!

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Cover of a new edition of Madagascar –             more about the book below!

Let’s get the New Year off to a scary flying start with a look at monstrous even man-eating plants.  There have always been strange or mythical plants but from the second half of the 19thc they take on new and often terrifying forms, especially in fiction.

What caused this fascination with  hostile or mutant  plants ? The answer seems to be the pioneering scientific work about evolution by none other than Charles Darwin.   That might seem like a strange claim but read on to find out more…  and to discover why, even if unwittingly, Darwin started a whole new genre of plant-related fiction which started with the Man-Eating Tree of Madagascar!   But everything is not always as it seems as you’ll see if you read on…

Sundew – Drosera 

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Tomorrow the blog celebrates its 10th birthday!

The first post was on New Years Eve 2013 and  the numbers reading  have continued to grow apace with over 222,000 views  over the course of the year,  well up on last year’s already record 152,000, the 100,000 for 2020 and less than 7,000 for the whole of 2014!  All adding up to a grand total of over 850,000. 

As always, thank you  for your loyal support and the nice comments. Please keep  telling your friends about the blog and get them to join the mailing list.  Just  go to the very bottom of any post, enter an email address and each new post  will appear, as if by magic, early on Saturday morning in time for breakfast.

And now for the quiz….

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MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Over the past ten years I’ve done many of the obvious more glamorous Christmas-related plants so now it’s finally the turn of Brussels Sprouts to star in the  blog!

Poor old Brussels Sprouts. They’re a bit like Marmite: you either love them or loathe them. They’re the butt of almost endless jokes even though they’re a traditional part of Christmas. I say traditional  but in fact they’re a newcomer to the vegetable kingdom and have probably only been around for a couple of hundred years.

So what’s the story behind this often overcooked and under-loved Christmas stalwart?

What’s this? Answer at the end of the post.

Where does Zeus come into it?

Why was Charles Darwin so interested in them?

And obviously what, if anything, have sprouts got to do with Brussels?

But if you can’t face reading about sprouts why not check out some of the previous Christmas posts on Amaryllis; Mistletoe ; Ivy ; the Glastonbury Thorn ; Poinsettia ; or even artificial decorations ?

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