The great Tree of Life –The tangled bank – Publishing – Anthropocentrisms – Kew Gardens – Voyaging – In Australia – Darwin’s botanical ignorance – Darwin learns botany – the Hookers – ‘The Origin of Species’ – Artificial and Natural Selections –Paleo-botany – Super-continents or migration? – Orchidiae – – Brown and Sprengel – Cross-fertilisation – The necessity of sex – Sexual selection – The utility of beauty – Colour vision – Marketing Memes – ‘fatal to my theory’: Kelvin and Jenkin – Darwin runs out of time – Darwin runs faster – Pangenesis – ‘Let us imagine’ – Mendel – Life, the unfinished experiment

Despite Charles Darwin’s confessing in 1843 to an ‘entire ignorance of Botany’, he had, before his death in 1882, inherited the laurel of Jupiter Botanicus. On the centenary of The Origin of Species in 1959, population geneticist J. B. S. Haldane valued Darwin’s botanical researches more highly than his earlier work on evolution. In truth, those elements were inseparable, since he supported natural selection with studies of plants, notably their sexual reproduction. So significant was flora to Darwin’s conceptualising of evolution that he elaborated on the metaphor of a branching bush to illustrate his version of descent with modification:

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