One of the stars of Jenny Uglow’s previous book, The Lunar Men, was Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, author of a remarkably fanciful and elaborate scientific poem, ‘The Botanic Garden’, and of a hefty tome on the science of gardening and agriculture. Dr Danvin was also a keen promoter of hothouses: his own was eighty-two feet long and provided him with melons, cucumbers and grapes, but not, he reluctantly admitted, pineapples.

Literary Review

May 2004

Categories

Miranda Seymour

Must You Stay?

A Songbird in Knightsbridge

What the Valet Did

Hostess with the Mostest

The Black Underwear was a Practical Choice

Corners of Foreign Fields

Palazzo Non Finito

The Marriage Plot

Crowning Glories

How Beautiful They Stand

The Real Donna Inez

Get with the Program

Passion For Cultivation

The Untouchables

Clasping Cupid

Sandwich Scandal

Family Affairs

Tales of the Workhouse

Seeds of Thought

Plucking Roses

Coming Into Bloom

Building A Life

Don’t Mention The War

Out of the Caskets