Curious how life’s minutiae can overlap. There I was, busy completing pages for the blog companion to The Lost Orchid, blissfully dredging up all manner of (copyright-free) images of glasshouses, orchids, Darwin and eccentric plant hunters. All the while I was tapping away, I was thanking the rain gods for being so busy and preventing me from having to do any actual horticulture myself.
The afternoon drew on, the sun set, the blackbirds retreated squawking into the shrubbery. Let’s have a fire, tonight, said I. Time to stop work, said he. I fished out an old mag, and stopped short, having nearly ripped up a genteel article on … Mrs Darwin’s Greenhouse.
What a gem it was, tucked away in a rather upmarket varsity publication, featuring ‘secret Cambridge’.
I’m a sucker for Victorian glasshouses (and in another weird coincidence, I live in Glasshouse Lane), and this piece was all about the conservatory acquired by Emma Darwin, wife to the naturalist, in 1883, after his death.
The de…