Plant specimens and teaching materials that inspired Charles Darwin and qualified him to work as a naturalist on HMS Beagle have been unearthed from an archive in Cambridge and will be used for the first time to teach contemporary students about botany.
The fragile specimens, ink drawings and watercolour illustrations of plants belonged to Darwin’s teacher and mentor, Prof John Stevens Henslow, and have been stored in Cambridge University’s herbarium for nearly 200 years.
Some of the “very rare” watercolours and drawings, published for the first time in the Guardian, are believed to be the earliest botanical illustrations Henslow produced to teach his students. Others are specimens of plants Darwin would have seen for himself.
“When Darwin came to Cambridge, he studied botany formally for the first time. He enjoyed Henslow’s course so much that he took it three years in a row,” said Dr Raphaella Hull, acting head of learning for Cambridge University Botanic Garden (CUBG). “Henslow introduced him to the concept of variation, laying the foundation for Darwin’s later theory of evolution.”
As an Anglican clergyman and natural theologian, Henslow believed studying plants could reveal God’s wisdom and closely observed variations within plant species as he sought to document the infinite extent, utility and magnificence of divine creation.
He collected the specimens and designed the illustrations so he could begin offering Cambridge undergraduates an annual botany course in 1827.
When Darwin arrived in Cambridge in 1828, he became one of the first students to attend Henslow’s groundbreaking five-week course. Darwin already had an interest in the natural world, piqued by a natural history group he had joined while studying medicine at Edinburgh University. But he had dropped the course after two years, realising he did not want to follow in his father’s footsteps to become a doctor and heading instead to Cambridge intending to become a clergyman.
Henslow took Darwin and his fellow students on “herborising excursions” into the Cambridgeshire fens and taught them how to identify, categorise and collect plants, while systematically observing the adaptations of different plant species to their environment.
This formed Darwin’s introduction to the scientific study of botany and the insights that rigorous collection of empirical data could offer about the natural world. He later described Henslow as having “influenced my whole career more than any other”.
“I fully believe a better man never walked this Earth,” he wrote when Henslow died in 1861.
CUBG is reviving the spirit and content of Henslow’s teaching by launching a four-week summer course in botany aimed at internal and external undergraduate and postgraduate students, academic researchers and professionals working in ecology, horticulture, conservation or related fields.
During the course, students will be taught about botany using the original teaching materials and hands-on techniques Henslow used to teach Darwin in the 1820s, as well as field excursions to the kinds of habitats Darwin visited in the Cambridgeshire countryside.
“Botany has all but disappeared as a stand-alone undergraduate degree in the UK, and that creates a real gap in how people are trained to understand plants,” said Prof Sam Brockington, CUBG curator. “Even in plant science laboratories, we increasingly find otherwise talented students who don’t have the language or conceptual framework to describe plant form and diversity.”
One of the motivations for creating the course was to address that gap. “We designed what we felt was the ideal four-week immersive programme in botany, and when we compared it with the curriculum that Henslow taught in Cambridge in the 19th century, the overlap was remarkable. In many ways we are not just drawing inspiration from that tradition, we are reviving the spirit of Henslow himself,” said Brockington.
The fragile specimens, ink drawings and watercolour illustrations of plants belonged to Darwin’s teacher and mentor, Prof John Stevens Henslow, and have been stored in Cambridge University’s herbarium for nearly 200 years.
Some of the “very rare” watercolours and drawings, published for the first time in the Guardian, are believed to be the earliest botanical illustrations Henslow produced to teach his students. Others are specimens of plants Darwin would have seen for himself.
“When Darwin came to Cambridge, he studied botany formally for the first time. He enjoyed Henslow’s course so much that he took it three years in a row,” said Dr Raphaella Hull, acting head of learning for Cambridge University Botanic Garden (CUBG). “Henslow introduced him to the concept of variation, laying the foundation for Darwin’s later theory of evolution.”
As an Anglican clergyman and natural theologian, Henslow believed studying plants could reveal God’s wisdom and closely observed variations within plant species as he sought to document the infinite extent, utility and magnificence of divine creation.
He collected the specimens and designed the illustrations so he could begin offering Cambridge undergraduates an annual botany course in 1827.
When Darwin arrived in Cambridge in 1828, he became one of the first students to attend Henslow’s groundbreaking five-week course. Darwin already had an interest in the natural world, piqued by a natural history group he had joined while studying medicine at Edinburgh University. But he had dropped the course after two years, realising he did not want to follow in his father’s footsteps to become a doctor and heading instead to Cambridge intending to become a clergyman.
Henslow took Darwin and his fellow students on “herborising excursions” into the Cambridgeshire fens and taught them how to identify, categorise and collect plants, while systematically observing the adaptations of different plant species to their environment.
This formed Darwin’s introduction to the scientific study of botany and the insights that rigorous collection of empirical data could offer about the natural world. He later described Henslow as having “influenced my whole career more than any other”.
“I fully believe a better man never walked this Earth,” he wrote when Henslow died in 1861.
CUBG is reviving the spirit and content of Henslow’s teaching by launching a four-week summer course in botany aimed at internal and external undergraduate and postgraduate students, academic researchers and professionals working in ecology, horticulture, conservation or related fields.
During the course, students will be taught about botany using the original teaching materials and hands-on techniques Henslow used to teach Darwin in the 1820s, as well as field excursions to the kinds of habitats Darwin visited in the Cambridgeshire countryside.
“Botany has all but disappeared as a stand-alone undergraduate degree in the UK, and that creates a real gap in how people are trained to understand plants,” said Prof Sam Brockington, CUBG curator. “Even in plant science laboratories, we increasingly find otherwise talented students who don’t have the language or conceptual framework to describe plant form and diversity.”
One of the motivations for creating the course was to address that gap. “We designed what we felt was the ideal four-week immersive programme in botany, and when we compared it with the curriculum that Henslow taught in Cambridge in the 19th century, the overlap was remarkable. In many ways we are not just drawing inspiration from that tradition, we are reviving the spirit of Henslow himself,” said Brockington.
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