Capabilities

Posted on 29/04/2016 by carolinemmurray

Syon smallTo the auditorium of the Sainsbury Laboratory in Cambridge (the amazingly heavy door of which was clearly not designed for the demographic of the Friends of Cambridge University Botanic Garden). However, we are stalwart types, and having overcome this obstacle, we sat down, in seats considerably more comfortable than I ever experienced as an undergraduate, to learn about Lancelot Brown. Continue reading →

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Pressing Matters

Posted on 24/04/2016 by carolinemmurray

Henslow bustIn my view, you can never have too much of a good thing if that thing involves the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, so I was delighted a few days ago to participate in a study session on J.S. Henslow’s influence on Darwin as a botanist, led by Christine Bartram, the custodian of the Cambridge University Herbarium. Continue reading →

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Object of the Month: April

Posted on 21/04/2016 by carolinemmurray

Full oxThis enormous jug was made at the Coalport factory in Coalbrookdale, Ironbridge Gorge, which is usually thought of as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. It was acquired for the Fitzwilliam Museum by the Friends in 2014, at a sale of items from the collection of the Royal Agricultural Society of England at Dreweatts Auctioneers in London. It is not (in my opinion) a thing of outstanding beauty, but it tells a remarkable story of agrarian and social history. Continue reading →

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Arsenic in the Arctic

Posted on 18/04/2016 by carolinemmurray

AuroraIt is perhaps surprising that one of the best known U.S. Arctic explorers first felt the Call of the North in land-locked Cincinnati, Ohio. Charles Francis Hall (1821–71) was born in Vermont, and apprenticed to a blacksmith in Rochester, New York. He then ‘drifted west’ with a wife, Mercy Anne (after his death an appeal was set up in Cincinnati for his widow and two children), becoming a seal-engraver and plate-maker in the city in which, a generation earlier, Mrs Trollope had attempted, unsuccessfully, to revive the family fortunes. Continue reading →

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Plant of the Month: April

Posted on 15/04/2016 by carolinemmurray

LyndewodeAs a poet (rather than as an academic), A.E. Housman had the occasional lapse (who does not wince at the immortal lines, ‘The goal stands up, the keeper/Stands up to keep the goal’, in a stanza that Vaughan Williams refused to set and which not even George Butterworth’s supreme artistry can really redeem?), but he was bang on the money about the cherry tree. Continue reading →

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The Maker of Devils

Posted on 12/04/2016 by carolinemmurray

PosterI was thinking of calling this piece ’36 Hours in s’ Hertogenbosch’, but some of those hours were spent sleeping, and anyway I then came across the fascinating information that Jeroen van Aken, aka Hieronymus Bosch, was also known as a ‘duvelmakere’, or ‘maker of devils’. This is the five hundredth anniversary of his death in 1516, and the town of s’ Hertogenbosch (‘The Duke’s Forest’, usually shortened to Den Bosch) is en fête.  Continue reading →

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Maria Dundas/Graham/Callcott

Posted on 07/04/2016 by carolinemmurray

ArthurMaria Dundas, later Graham, later Callcott, is another of the cohort of women (Fry, Coutts, Nightingale, Marcet, Caroline Herschel …) who give the lie to the nineteenth-century cliché about the angel in the house. Born on 19 July 1785 near Cockermouth in Cumberland (did she ever meet any rambling Wordsworths?), a tomboy, passionate about natural history, skilled in drawing and very keen on languages, she was a daughter of a naval captain who, after service throughout the Napoleonic Wars, was in 1808 put in charge of naval works at the East India Company’s harbour in Bombay [Mumbai]. Continue reading →

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St Lubbock And His Pet Wasp

Posted on 03/04/2016 by carolinemmurray

Lubbock bookA mostly self-taught polymath who knew everyone there was to known for two-thirds of the nineteenth century, banker, philanthropist, Member of Parliament, archaeologist, anthropologist, entomologist, geologist, best-selling author, slight eccentric (see pet wasp, and teaching poodle to read, below) and saviour of the Avebury megalithic site for the nation. Continue reading →

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Plant of the Month: March

Posted on 27/03/2016 by carolinemmurray

T. kaufmanniana 2Far be it from me to suggest that great minds work alike, but on returning from a happy expedition to photograph the species tulips in the alpine house at CUBG, I found that the Garden’s own ‘plant of the month’ for March is also species tulips. Continue reading →

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Etty Before Aunthood

Posted on 21/03/2016 by carolinemmurray

Child EttyLovers of Gwen Raverat’s memoir Period Piece will remember Aunt Etty as one of the more eccentric of a colourful band of Darwin aunts and uncles who populated her childhood. Henrietta Darwin (1843–1927) was the eldest surviving daughter of Charles and Emma Darwin (her elder sister Annie died aged nine in 1851, and another daughter, Mary Eleanor, had lived for only a month in 1842). Continue reading →

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