Just south of the city centre, between Trumpington Road and Hills Road, there are forty acres where Cambridge goes to think about plants. The University Botanic Garden is beautiful, and people come for the lawns, the lake and the glasshouses. But it was built, first of all, to answer questions.
The University’s first botanic garden opened in 1762 on a cramped site in the middle of town, where plants were grown for medical students. By the early nineteenth century it had run out of room. John Stevens Henslow, the professor of botany, persuaded the University to buy a much larger plot on the edge of the city in 1831, and the first tree was planted there in 1846.
The professor who taught Darwin
Henslow is remembered today as the mentor of a young Charles Darwin, whom he encouraged to look closely at the variety of living things, and who later sailed on the Beagle on his recommendation. That curiosity is written into the garden itself. In the Systematic Beds, more than a hundred island beds group flowering plants by family, so that students can walk from one branch of the plant world to the next and see how they are related.
A garden laid out like a library, where every bed is a chapter.
Around them grow trees from across the temperate world, a lake fringed with reeds, a scented garden and, under glass, palms, orchids and plants from hot, dry deserts. The glasshouse range was rebuilt in the 1930s, much of it in Burmese teak, and still warms visitors on a cold winter morning.
An apple tree with a famous family
For almost seventy years, the edge of Brookside Lawn was home to one of the garden’s most-visited trees: a Flower of Kent apple grown from the tree at Newton’s family home at Woolsthorpe, the one said to have set him thinking about gravity. It came down in Storm Eunice in February 2022. Its story, like the garden’s, is about how a single small observation can grow into something much bigger.
[Fact-check before publishing: dates and details.]