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A GARDEN IS A LOVESOME THING

In which our author ventures outdoors, gets his hands dirty, extols the virtues of soil, and explores the wriggly predilections of a certain Mr Darwin

‘No garden, however small, should contain less than two acres of rough woodland.’

It’s a fine ambition, and one to which I’m sure we all aspire, but the words of Nathaniel, 1st Baron Rothschild, whose garden at Tring Park contained rather more than that, will have a hollow ring to anyone looking out of their back window over a 10-square-metre area of mossy flagstones and a brick wall.

While it’s easy to mock the Noble Lord’s words – and they may well be apocryphal in any case – they bring into focus a problem facing any gardener: how do you manage the resources at your disposal? Give a hundred people that 10-square-metre area, and you’ll get a hundred different gardens. Some will dig up the flagstones and conjure a horticultural miracle, making full use of every square centimetre; others might fill it with pots from the local garden centre and watch forlornly as they all die for want of care and attention; some might go for the gnome option;* others still might make a desultory attempt to enliven the place and then lose the will completely, racked with indecision, condemning it to a perpetual fate as home for a corner of Busy Lizzies and a dying basil plant from Sainsbury’s.

But, regardless of size, the garden – from window-ledge herb box to statuary-strewn parkland – represents an opportunity for humans to make their mark on an outside space. And as anyone who has ever had a garden will attest, it’s also an opportunity not only to welcome nature in, to nurture and tend to it, but also to keep it at bay with every means at our disposal.

We love nature, but only if it signs our Terms and Conditions.

I am a lifelong non-gardener. Not only that, I am the worst kind: one married to a gardening professional. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but not half as dangerous as two decades being spoonfed horticultural luxury on a daily basis. I now take it for granted that at any time of year I can stroll to the bottom of the garden and be treated to a feast of sensory stimulation, whether it’s the sap-burst of burgeoning spring, the bright colours and heady scents of flowering plants in summer, the melancholy decay of autumn or the subtle variety of greenery that forms the backdrop to a winter garden as plants hunker down and take a rest before the season of growth begins again.

It’s with the spirit of Lord Rothschild in mind, and with due trepidation, that I describe our garden as ‘small’. Compared with the 300-odd acres Rothschild had at his disposal, this description is certainly accurate; next to the aforementioned mossy flagstones, it’s Avalon. It measures, I’ve just worked out, 33 metres by 7. Like many city gardens it’s the width of the house, and backs on to a similar garden in a similar street. Bounded by wooden-panel fencing on each side and a bramble-smothered wall at the end, it’s much like many urban gardens: terrace at the top, shed at the bottom, space in between to do with as you will. Our neighbours on one side have patchy grass, a trampoline, a swing, a table, a pile of bricks and two inexplicable car tyres; on the other side, the space is notable for decking, shrubs, a large pergola and good intentions. Incursions into other people’s territory are rare: the odd football flying over the fence, an overhanging tree or two,* but mostly we keep ourselves to ourselves in true London fashion.^†

When we moved in, ten years ago, we could have done anything with our space. What was left by the previous tenants was nothing to write home about, but as this was now our home there would have been little point in doing so anyway. The world, or a small part of it, was our oyster. We could have made a herb garden as might have been found in a thirteenth-century monastery; a miniaturised emulation of the parterres at Wilton House; a classic English cottage garden, flowers and shrubs and fruit and vegetables all bundled in together, overflowing with abundance. We could have constructed a model village, a crazy-golf course, or – yes, indeed – a rampant collection of plastic gnomes. We could even, as I only half jokingly suggested, have paved the whole thing with AstroTurf and installed a cricket net.

We didn’t, of course. Because what we needed at the time was a lawn. A good, hard-wearing London lawn, for the playing of ball games and general small-child-based rambunctiousness.

In this we weren’t unusual. Few things encapsulate the British approach to gardens like the lawn.* Historically, we’ve loved them, from the smooth, lush bowling greens that became fashionable in the thirteenth century to the archetypal suburban lawn of the second half of the twentieth, mown to within an inch of its life and denuded of anything extraneous,^† even down to the merest hint of moss or clover, and all in an effort to show the Joneses what’s bloody what. The close-cut lawn is the apogee of our obsession with everything being neat and tidy, including nature. Get your hair cut, tuck your shirt in, shine your shoes, prune the roses, mow the lawn – the vicar’s coming to tea.

But needs evolve, and so do gardens. Rambunctiousness turns into something slower and gentler. And so the flower beds nibbled into the lawn, plants of various sizes and colours appeared, and what was once a playground is now a haven of peace and horticultural abundance.

I had little to do with this process, merely nodding with a mixture of seigneurial approval and admiration as Tessa made yet another suggestion that would make the garden seem, Tardis-like, larger than it was – not to mention more abundant and fertile – and then proceeded to implement it.

If we don’t have the required two acres of rough woodland, there are remnants of the surrounding area’s past as the gardens of a local manor house, and there remain half a dozen or so wellestablished large trees in the immediate vicinity – oaks, a couple of planes, an arresting cedar of Lebanon two doors down – to give interest to the skyline. They also house a variety of birds, most of which, at one time or another, have made forays to the feeders on our terrace.

While these trees do their bit in lending the backdrop to our garden a bit of variety in a suburban landscape, it’s difficult to ignore that at the heart of the whole set-up – and the ugliest element of it – are the fences marking the boundaries to our property. They’re a constant reminder that the root of the word ‘garden’ is the early Indo-European word ghordos, meaning ‘enclosure’.* Clear straight lines, delineating what’s what, where’s where, and whose is whose. ‘This is mine, that’s yours’ – but also: ‘Out there is wilderness, nature in the raw; in here – this is for humans.’* But nature abhors a straight line, and everywhere there’s evidence of its unerring instinct for encroachment – tendrils of bindweed creeping under the fence, wisteria^† snaking over it, ivy engulfing everything.

If wisteria is welcomed for its fetching annual display – light lilac flowers hanging in drooping bunches from gnarly branches against a whitewashed wall being almost obligatory for a certain kind of suburban house – the other two cause more consternation. Ivy’s dark and leafy attractiveness is offset by its tendency for rampant growth, giving it a reputation for attaching itself to buildings and sucking the life out of them.^‡ And while my innocent reaction to the elegant white trumpet-shaped flower of Convolvulus arvensis (bindweed, to give its common name^§) has always been ‘Oh look how pretty’, the gardener’s is ‘Fetch me the flame-thrower, Beryl.’

This separation between plant and weed, acceptable and unacceptable, is bewildering to the uninitiated, but second nature to gardeners. It’s also embedded in the history of gardening. When the Romans* found their way to Britain a couple of millennia ago, they changed the face of gardening along with everything else. Their introduction of an abundance of plants – among them quince, mulberry, leeks, turnips, kale, asparagus, parsley, dill, marjoram and much much more – was accompanied by pesticidal products and techniques: tar, bitumen, fumigation. And the struggle has continued ever since. This taming of nature has varied in degree down the ages, but at the heart of it is the imposition of human influence on the wild – the illusion of balance achieved only by constant efforts to keep nature in check. From the grandest excesses of the formal gardens of stately homes – with rampant statuary, fountains, topiary and grottoes – to the smallest urban ‘pocket handkerchief’, the garden has always been an extension of our indoor sacred space: access denied to the interloper, be it mildew or mare’s tail, squirrel or slug.

The impossible balance – being simultaneously both with and against nature – has always been at the heart of gardening. But there are other underlying threads. The garden is a form of self-expression – this is who I am, what I like, how I see the world – but it’s also a reflection of the prevailing concerns and character of the society of the day. We need only to look to the twentieth century to see the rhythms of hardship, recovery and comfort find expression in gardening fashions. Both world wars saw a natural intensification of subsistence gardening at all levels of society – George V grew potatoes in the flower beds at Buckingham Palace in the First World War, and the slogan ‘Dig for Victory!’* led to massive use of both private and public land for the growth of vegetables in the Second. And when the fighting was, at least temporarily, done with, people looked to their outside spaces for solace and pleasure. In both the 1920s and the 1950s, home ownership blossomed, and with this growth came a renewal of interest in the garden as a place of pleasure, pride and – once the lawn was mown, slug pellets put down, fruit trees sprayed, weeds eradicated, and a million other tiny niggles identified and dealt with – relaxation.

The niggles are, naturally, part of the gardener’s stock-in-trade. Their work is never done. ‘Plan your garden as if you will live forever’, as the old saying has it – but just be aware that most of forever will be spent rooting out dandelions, staking the apple tree, and wondering whether the Lythrum salicaria^† wouldn’t do better if it was moved over there where the ground is boggier, ooh and how about putting the Lamprocapnos spectabilis^‡ over there to give it a bit of shade in the spring, what do you think? Even maintaining the status quo requires constant attention. To leave a garden untended, even for a short time, is to understand what nature can do by itself, and if you’re going to meet it halfway you need to be prepared for it to overrun you the moment your back is turned.

But it’s that quest for perfection, even while knowing such perfection is unattainable, that keeps the gardener going. Every time you put something in the ground you don’t know if it’ll come up or run rampant or be chomped by slugs or be engulfed by a larger, more prolific plant behind it. So you read and you learn and you get plants and some will thrive and others won’t, and then you ask yourself why and get more plants and put them in different places and gradually you make sense of it all without ever quite understanding exactly why certain things work and others don’t.

Gardening, like so many things, can easily be seen as a metaphor for life.

If my experience of gardens is that of a gardenee rather than a gardener, it’s not that I can’t see the attraction.

There’s the satisfaction gained from nurturing a plant: the ritual of sowing a seed in a pot, tamping down the compost as if putting a newborn to bed; the thrill of seeing that first green speck nudge aside the soil, all promise and future; the enduring glow brought on by its slow and steady growth, and then the giddy elation of seeing it flower or fruit, or just the quiet triumph engendered by the simple fact of its continued survival. All of these feelings are valid, even if such success was merely a happy accident of positioning, timing and the confluence of horticultural circumstances over which you have no real control. It’s your plant; you gave it life, so you get to reap the reward.

There’s also the deeper, less immediately tangible satisfaction of contact with larger, invisible rhythms. A garden marks the seasons, reminds us of the cycles of the year, the slow changes that cannot be rushed. The innate appreciation of these rhythms might be why I have never met an impatient gardener. They persevere, taking setbacks with a rueful laugh, and then they wonder how they can do it better next time.

And while they lavish love and energy on the garden, it gives it right back, whether in the form of flowers or food or the dappled shade cast on a swing chair by a Japanese maple. It’s a two-way relationship: we tend the garden, it tends us, from the wispy fragrance of jasmine flowers to the clods of earth shaken off a recently dug potato. And none of it – from Alchemilla mollis to Zinnia angustifolia – is anything without one vital ingredient: soil.*

Give a gardener a brisk cold day, a pair of wellingtons, some twine, a sharp pair of secateurs, the heft of a really good hoe, a seed catalogue, a dibber, a trug full of raspberries, a capacious water butt,^† bees thronging on lavender, a compost heap, a shed to potter in, a good solid wheelbarrow, a bag of mulch or the fecund ripeness of well-rotted manure, and they’ll be happy enough.

But if you want to see a gardener glow, just say the word ‘soil’. Something happens to them – something fundamental. An infusion of warmth, a deep feeding of the soul.

If they’re the talkative type, you won’t be able to stop them. There’ll be talk of loam and nutrients, of friability and pH, of waterlogging and compaction, and of chalk and peat and sand and silt and clay.^‡ There will be words like ‘humus’ and ‘black gold’. There might be a fifteen-minute discourse on the feel of soil in the hand, the dark crumble of it as it filters through your fingers, the particular soily smell that appeals to human senses in subtle, primeval ways.

If they know you well enough, they might even try you with the word ‘tilth’.*

This veneration of the soil has a spiritual element. It’s not just about growing pretty flowers, although that might be incentive enough for many. You won’t find a gardener who isn’t at their happiest with at least a bit of dirt under their fingernails, and this connection with the earth is deep and fundamental, almost as if they yearn to sink a tap root into it, to draw life from its nutrients and become one with it. And that contact with the soil – even the simplest act of hollowing out a hole in a flower bed, inserting a plant and packing the earth around its roots – engenders feelings of wellbeing, often visibly and immediately.

But as any good gardener knows, dirt isn’t just dirt. There’s a world of life underfoot: vital, invisible, and extremely hungry.

First, take your underpants. Any brand will do, so long as they’re made of cotton. Now bury them somewhere in the garden. It’s wise to leave a corner sticking up out of the soil. That way, when you come back to them in a few weeks to see how they’re doing, you won’t spend half an hour digging up the petunias in a vain search for a pair of rotted undies.

In those few weeks a miracle will have taken place. The scale of the miracle will depend on the health of your soil. The larger its microbial diversity, the less there will be of your underpants when you retrieve them.

This is a good thing.

In every little patch of earth live a million strange and tiny beings. From the tidgiest bacteria and actinomycetes, up through the rotifers and nematodes and minuscule flatworms, then into the realm of the barely visible – springtails, potworms, fly larvae, beetle larvae, centipedes, millipedes, those little snails you occasionally come across that look like a tiny pebble or a piece of grit but it’s only when you balance them on your fingertip that you see the fine coil of the pattern on their shell and you start thinking about the variety of life on earth and evolution and fractals and the mathematics of nature and that article you read about how the Fibonacci sequence is all around us* and before long you’re lost in a fog of wonder about, well, all of everything.

Oh, and slugs, too. Yuk.

Or maybe not yuk, if you’re of a certain inclination. It’s true that from the human perspective slugs don’t seem to have much going for them. They eat our crops and leave slimy trails all over the place – said slime being notable for its indelibility. But this is to dismiss the benefits they bring as both consumers of decomposing vegetation and valuable food sources for thrushes and beetles and ants and hedgehogs and any number of the aforementioned miniature beasties.

The same, by the way, goes for snails. We’re much fonder of snails, partly because of the fractal spiral thing, but also because a snail carries its house on its back, a habit we equate, for some reason, with a sort of plucky self-sufficiency and resourcefulness. As a measure of how we view the two genera, look at how we anthropomorphise them. Brian, the endearingly dim-witted character in The Magic Roundabout, was a snail; Jabba the Hut was, if not an actual slug, the embodiment of everything we hate about them.

Gardeners, of course, loathe both slugs and snails* with the heat of a thousand fiery suns. If the word ‘soil’ reveals a gardener’s deeply compassionate and human side, just try them with the word ‘slug’ and watch as the demons take possession, transforming them into sadistic maniacs in the grip of an unquenchable bloodlust.

But I have strayed from the main point – namely, those microscopic beasts that have chomped your underpants. Most of the grunt work in that department is done by the smaller creatures, the bacteria and nematodes and suchlike. Your underpants contain cellulose, which is catnip to the little wrigglers. And as they work their way through the material, their excretions serve only to enrich the soil. Even better, there’s increasing evidence that the benefits of getting your hands dirty aren’t just woolly ‘Oh isn’t it lovely to get some fresh air and muck around in dirt’ sentiment, but actually have a scientific basis. Contact with the common bacteria Mycobacterium vaccae,^† to pick just one example, triggers the release of serotonin, which, as I’m sure we all know by now, is a Good Thing.

So it’s clear that going outside and rootling around in the dirt is a beneficial and healthy thing to do. Throw in the stimulus of colour and scent and the general sense of well-being engendered by spending time outdoors, and it’s almost enough to make me take up gardening.

But in the list of soil-dwelling organisms above, I made one deliberate omission. Leaving the best till last, you could say. Because if all those organisms are doing excellent things to the soil, they pale into insignificance next to the mighty earthworm.

And mention of earthworms leads, as night follows day, to an undeniably Great Man.

By all means, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life;* certainly, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex; naturally, the finches and the climbing plants and the barnacles and the expression of emotion on the human face and the coral reefs and the orchids and the insectivorous plants and the fundamental recalibration of everything humans had ever thought about themselves in relation to all other life and the history of the planet.

All of those things, obviously.

But how intriguing and charming that the last work of this extraordinary life – a project that occupied Charles Darwin, on and off, for forty years – should be about earthworms. His own description of The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits* is rather touching: ‘This is a subject of but small importance; and I know not whether it will interest any readers, but it has interested me.’

That mild-mannered understatement, ‘it has interested me’, conceals much. Because when a subject interested Charles Darwin, no aspect of it went unexamined. And it’s somehow fitting that, having produced the most influential book of his (or any other) era, he chose to see out his days not resting on his laurels or exploiting his fame for further gain, but in pursuing his lifelong obsession with understanding how it all works.

And by ‘it all’ I naturally mean ‘life on earth’.

Earthworms aren’t, on the face of it, a promising subject, and would have seemed even less so to the Victorian reader. Despite the success and acceptance of Origin,^† people still had^‡ entrenched ideas about the superiority of mankind over the rest of the animal kingdom. And worms, creatures of the dirt, would have been regarded as the lowest of the low. They still are in some quarters, I suspect, despite all we know about their importance.

Darwin’s dogged study of earthworms,^§ and the conclusions he reached about their contribution to the workings of the world, encompassed every aspect of their lives. As part of his relentless quest to uncover their mysteries, the earthworms of Down House were subjected to every test he could think of. He measured their sensitivity to heat and cold, light and dark; their powers of suction and traction; what they did to the soil and how; how much earth they moved, where they put it, and how long it took;* their potential for intelligence; their role in levelling ground and burying ancient buildings; their senses of smell, taste and hearing – this latter manifesting itself in their reactions to having the bassoon played at them, a scenario that conjures, more than any of the other studies, irresistible and inadvertently comic images.

Crucially, he went into these studies without any preconceptions. He merely did what he had always done: assembled the data, analysed it, came to conclusions.

It’s that last bit that’s deceptively simple. Anyone, given patience and time, can collect and analyse data – it was in the joining of the dots that his genius lay, as well as his underrated ability to express these findings in language easily understandable to the layperson. At the heart of it all was a simple truth: he loved looking at things. Not just looking for looking’s sake, but looking at, through and beyond things to find the patterns and processes that drove and linked them. It was slow, relentless work, with no guarantee of results.

And here’s the thing. He did it over not just years but decades. He studied and studied, observing in a way that few before or since have achieved. Thousands and thousands of tiny dots on an infinitely large piece of paper, joined by the power of perceptive observation and a rare capacity for deep and logical thought.

His doggedly unromantic approach – painstaking, going over the figurative and literal ground inch by inch – was, and is, at odds with the way many people see and describe nature. Which isn’t to say he didn’t approach it with a due sense of awe and wonder. On the contrary. But by revealing the true nature of things, he exposed their magic in a different way.

It’s easy to forget, too, that when he writes about nature, he includes us. We’re not at the top, as had previously been assumed, the pinnacle of God’s creation. We’re no different from the lowly worm or any of the others: naturally predisposed to survival, slave to evolution, the fundamental objective of our existence simply and solely to make it through to the next generation.

Yes, we have enlarged brains and opposable thumbs and any number of things that have enabled us, for better or for worse, to dominate the planet in the extraordinarily short time we’ve been on it. But that doesn’t make us better than a nematode or a horsefly or a giraffe or Tineola bisselliella. Just different. That’s the whole point, but one that still, sadly, seems to be lost on a large portion of humanity.

As with On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life,* Darwin’s work on earthworms wasn’t all new – although he paved the way for a new approach to the subject, he was building on the achievements of others in the field. And there was no controversy attached to it, no overturning of entrenched and fundamental ideas. But in its own way, because it focused on an aspect of the natural world that most people ignored, even in that time of discovery, the book was just as radical.

Its argument is simple: worms are amazing and important, and these are the reasons why. And as he leads you through those reasons, with all the evidence painstakingly laid out in prose and table form,* he leaves you with little choice but to agree, and not just to nod along, but to share his enthusiasm.

At the conclusion of the book, Darwin writes this: ‘When we behold a wide, turf-covered expanse, we should remember that its smoothness, on which so much of its beauty depends, is mainly due to all the inequalities having been slowly levelled by worms . . . It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organised creatures.’

How elegant, how appealing to the Victorian sensibility, relating a potentially obscure subject to something commonplace like a lawn, something the reader would hold dear. He’s saying, ‘This sciencey thing is a homely thing too, something we can all understand.’ Few have looked closer or better than Darwin; with those words he encourages us to emulate him, even if in a small way, and to remember the importance of things we all too easily dismiss. It almost makes you want to stand up and cheer.

And so, in honour of both the great man and the mighty worm, I go to Down House, just outside the small village of Downe^† in Kent, to look at his lawn.

I could, and probably should, walk there. It’s eleven miles, door to door. Nothing I can’t manage, but time-consuming. So I compromise: train to Beckenham, then walk, a schedule that should deliver me to Darwin’s front door just on opening time. It’s a lovely day for it, and what better way to spend it than to stroll along country lanes enjoying the delights of that nightmare of the spoonerism-prone newsreader, the Kent countryside?

Several better ways, as it turns out. There’s no doubt that the scenery is attractive, but the lanes around Downe have not evolved to favour the pedestrian. Cars and vans pass at speed, showing as much consideration for the benighted walker as a song thrush does for a snail. After a while it occurs to me that it might just be easier if I complete the walk sideways, pressed against the brambles on the steep bank lining the road, better to accommodate the vehicles that are in such a hurry to get to wherever it is they’re going.

It’s easy to think of all the things that have changed since Darwin’s time, but on the approach to the house, and on arrival there, I’m more struck by all the things that are the same. Take away the Ocado vans and Ford Mondeos and the light aircraft occasionally taking off from nearby Biggin Hill airfield, and there’s a timeless quality about this part of the world. It’s even possible, albeit with a bit of squinting, to picture the surrounding fields as they would have been when the Darwins moved here in 1842.

This timelessness is only enhanced on entering the house, which has been lovingly restored by English Heritage with many of Darwin’s own furnishings and artefacts, as well as faithful period decoration. Exercise a bit of imagination and you can plonk yourself in the middle of family meals in the dining room, watch Charles and Emma conducting their daily backgammon duel in the sitting room, or imagine son Francis playing the bassoon to a bell jar of earthworms while father Charles takes diligent notes on their reaction.

I’m taken by all the details of the house, and the richness of the exhibition upstairs, which brings vividly to life Darwin’s many achievements, from the voyage on The Beagle to the groundbreaking work on barnacles and beyond. But it’s only when I enter the study that it hits me.

This is where it happened. Here. In this room. All that thought and work and insight, right here where I’m standing. That rectangular Pembroke table, laden with scientific instruments, notebooks and papers; that horsehair armchair, raised on castors for ease of movement about the room; those glass-stoppered bottles and pillboxes with powders and tinctures and specimens; the microscope, the brush, the rock samples, the bones – all his, all in front of me, a monument to quiet industry.

It’s easy to fetishise these things – ‘I say, look at this, a piece of dirt once trodden in by the great man himself!’ – but there’s something about this room that facilitates the connection between the visitor and the genius. Something about the darkness of it, sunlight trickling through the wooden shutters for only a couple of hours each day. Something about the way it’s been preserved yet somehow kept alive. Something, dare I say it, metaphysical.

I spend half an hour in there, allowing this atmosphere to settle on me, in no hurry to move on. There are no interruptions, no puncturing of the bubble. I have, for just a moment, the fanciful thought that I’ve stumbled through some sort of portal, and that any moment now he will pad back into the room, returning from some household errand to the serious matter of work. It’s an impression only strengthened by the sound of a man’s voice murmuring outside in the corridor. And then he comes in, the first person I’ve seen for half an hour, and it’s one of the group that was in the entrance hall when I arrived, a modern person with a modern phone and a modern leather bag, barging into my Victorian time travel and talking over his shoulder to someone else out in the corridor.

‘Oh, we’ve done this room already. Let’s go to the cafe.’

He turns and leaves. I return reluctantly to the real world, and head out to the garden.

Outside, the spell descends again.

I’m on the lawn, looking back across it at the house. Just a few yards away, across a gravel path, are the greenhouses, where Darwin conducted experiments on orchids and climbing plants and insectivorous plants and honestly it’s exhausting just thinking about the scope of his lifetime’s work.

The greenhouses are still equipped with the heating pipes Darwin installed to keep the tropical-plant specimens he was studying at a suitable temperature. They’re tempting, but I leave them for the moment. I’m here to look at a circular stone slab embedded in the grass. Its purpose would have been obscure to many, but to the Darwins it was an important long-term monitoring device. They called it the ‘worm stone’, and along with a dinky piece of copperand-wood apparatus now on display in a glass case in the house, it was used to measure the amount of soil displaced by earthworms.*

The location of this experiment is a little corner underneath a Spanish chestnut, some distance from the house. On a day like today, warm in the early autumn sun, a lawn like this is a positive invitation to lay a tartan rug on the ground, tuck into genteel cucumber sandwiches and Victoria sponge cake, and then doze quietly as the children charge around playing some invented game, the rules known only to the participants but no doubt involving a lot of running and shouting.

But I have one more part of the Darwin estate to visit, so, resisting the temptation to dig down into the lawn with my bare hands in the hope of extracting an earthworm, I walk down the gravel path, through the abundant and extensive kitchen garden, turn left through the gate in the wall, and into the woods. I’m following a circular route Darwin took every afternoon, allowing the researches conducted in the morning to percolate through his brain and join the mulch that fuels all sorts of creativity and advancement.

It’s easy to think that genius comes in a flash – Eureka! – but the truth is far more mundane. The moment is typically preceded by immense quantities of thought, hard work and confusion. And often the flash of inspiration strikes when the mind is allowed to roam unfettered, rather than having to focus on the work at hand. It’s no coincidence that Archimedes had his Eureka moment in the bath – baths are breeding grounds for inspiration. And so are woodland walks.

This is a good one, as they go. Peaceful, solitary. Probably about two acres, give or take, of rough woodland,* rented by Darwin a few years after he moved to Down House, and relatively unchanged since, with the most obvious exception of the odd laminated activity card hanging from a piece of string to encourage the young to explore.

The relative hubbub of the house, with its tour group and cafe, feels a mile away, and I take it slowly, consciously tamping down my natural inclination to stride out at a pulse-raising pace. This walk was known to the family as the sandwalk, because of the red sand that held together the gravel on the path. He would do five laps, flicking aside one of five flints by an ash tree at the entrance point for each completed lap.

There are no flints that I can find, but I manage to keep track of my three laps in my head, and as I walk I do what you do on a walk in the woods. A pleasant saunter, drinking in the tranquillity and the light and the smell of the soil, pondering things in general and Darwin in particular. It’s tempting to think that his aura somehow rubs off, that simply by visiting this place we are somehow improved. But if I recognise how simplistic this is, I do at the same time feel a tiny shift in me, an unexpressed resolution to slow down, to look better at things, not to take them for granted.

As I finish the third lap, and as if inspired by my surroundings, a thought – almost a stroke of genius – flashes into my head.

Tea. Cake. Home.

Even if we can’t all achieve greatness, it’s important to notice and cherish the small moments of inspiration.

There is, inevitably, a shop. I buy a jar of Down House honey – made, no doubt, by the descendants of Darwin’s bees – and two books: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life and a slim volume of his autobiographical writings.

At this, the volunteer at the till gives a small nod of approval.

‘Page 73. Look at page 73.’

He’s friendly but firm. It would be rude not to. Quickly enough, as I read, it becomes clear to me the words he’s thinking of: ‘. . . I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me.’

I close the book and pay for it.

‘I would love to know where that spot is,’ he says. ‘Just to be able to stand there and drink it in.’

I wonder if I passed the spot on my walk to the house that morning. It’s entirely possible. Perhaps it was even where I was nearly killed by an Audi with a grudge.

‘Me too,’ I say. ‘Me too.’

I pick up the books and the honey, and take my leave.

* There is a front garden not far from me that adopts this policy. When I walk past it I’m hard pushed not to gawp.

* The good-intentions neighbours have a lovely tree that overhangs our fence and acts as a home base for goldfinches and blue tits between raids on our bird feeders, so I’m definitely not complaining.

^† The guest of a former neighbour once threw a lit cigarette butt over the fence. It landed at my feet as I was eating lunch. They got it back immediately, accompanied by a complementary bark of rage.

* The word comes from the French laund, meaning ‘an open space among woods’.

^† According to the precepts laid down in The Lawn Expert by D. G. Hessayon, whose series covering every conceivable aspect of domestic gardening has now sold more than 60 million copies. I bet you have a copy of at least one of them on your shelves – whether or not you ever consult it is another matter entirely.

* Pleasingly, the word ‘paradise’ also derives from a word (pairidaeza in Persian) meaning ‘enclosure’. So a paradise garden is an ‘enclosure enclosure’.

* Once upon a time, back in the day, some gardens would have been sacred groves, devoted to the gods, and therefore not a place for humans. They’re not that fashionable in this day and age.

^† It’s named after Dr Caspar Wistar, an American physician, yet the official spelling remains ‘wisteria’. Other plants to suffer evolution of either spelling or pronunciation include fuchsia (named after sixteenth-century German botanist Leonhart Fuchs but routinely pronounced ‘fyoosher’) and dahlia (named after eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Anders Dahl but pronounced – in Britain, at least – ‘day-lee-a’). Yes, you’re right – I should let it go.

^‡ It doesn’t do this. It’s also unfortunate that, just as ivy’s getting going with the flowers in the autumn, we have a habit of cutting it back. This is bad news for the ivy bee, a relatively recent arrival to this country.

^§ Its roots can go to a depth of twenty feet, which does I suppose explain in part the gardener’s aversion to it. That and its habit of twining itself round other things and gradually smothering them.

* Of course it was the Romans. Who else was it going to be?

* Taken from an Evening Standard leader, it quickly replaced the original, relatively prosaic government slogan, ‘Grow More Food’.

^† Purple loosestrife, so I’m told.

^‡ Bleeding heart, apparently. You don’t think I’m the one who knows this stuff, do you?

* Yes, I know – hydroponics. Maybe allow me a sliver of rhetoric, however vague and inaccurate, to round the section off?

^† Or possibly, if my experience is anything to go by, two.

^‡ This last element is especially true of London gardeners, who can talk of little else.

* Which derives, I discover, from the verb ‘till’ – one of those ‘obvious when you know it’ connections. Disappointingly, the same connection can’t be made between ‘fill’ and ‘filth’.

* If you don’t believe me, look at a pineapple.

* But not, interestingly, puppy-dogs’ tails.

^† It’s related to tuberculosis, but don’t let that alarm you – it’s one of the good guys.

* We must give it its proper title, I feel – he took the trouble to write it out in full, so it’s only polite to reciprocate.

* Snappy subject, snappy title.

^† Having done my bit for the full title, I’m now allowing myself extreme abbreviation.

^‡ And, sad to say, often still have.

^§ ‘. . . unsung creature which, in its untold millions, transformed the land as the coral polyps did the tropical sea’.

* A modern estimate has it that earthworms turn over the equivalent of all the soil on earth to a depth of one inch every ten years.

* Back to the full title, just this once.

* The tables, I have to admit, do sometimes come as a bit of light relief.

^† The spelling of the village’s name was precipitated by ongoing confusion with County Down in Northern Ireland. The Darwins eschewed the extra ‘e’.

* Approximately 2 mm a year, in case you’re wondering.

* Lord Rothschild would approve.