This book was a pleasant romp through British scientific and pastoral history through the lens of Darwin's family. The author and her children explore their new home with sights set on finding the places that Darwin frequented during his research. There is a good mix of the personal and scientific here, and I found this one to be a great palate cleanser when the stress of the day was too much. A quaint, quiet read.

The Ghost in the Garden: In Search of Darwin's Lost Garden
by Jude Piesse is a sweet and interesting book about gardens, Darwin, and little excerpts from Darwin's Origin Of Species.

I read Origen a long time ago, enjoyed it then and I enjoyed it now. To be honest, my favorite parts of this book were the embedded narratives. I became very fond of the little stories involving Julie and her family.

I also enjoyed the little excerpts about Darwin and his family. All in all this was an enjoyable book and a perfect escape during a time when things are neither sweet nor happy. ( )

I have struggled my way through this book for the past two months. There is nothing wrong with it, but I think the combination of long COVID brain fog and additional health issues have put me off nonfiction for a while. I just lose my place and end up reading the same paragraphs again and again. This is unfair to the author because the few occasions when my head was not feeling foggy and out of focus, the story seemed very interesting. I liked reading about Darwin's mother, for example, and liked the bit of bite in the author remarking that material on his mother was there if people bothered to look. This tells me that if I were in better health, I would find this book engaging.

At the moment, though, I feel adrift in it. I am going to set it aside and perhaps after I am less affected by illness, go back to it and try to finish. ( )

I received this book through the LibraryThing's early reviewers program. In respect to the author I can not rate this book because it was not what I was expecting. I was interested in reading about Darwin and hoping to learn more about how he came to his conclusions. This book was about his Mother, her interest in plants, gardens etc. and the author's experience in researching the area where Darwin and his family lived. I gave up and did not finish this particular book.

In The Ghost in the Garden: In Search of Darwin’s Lost Garden, Jude Piesse argues, “The stories of The Mount’s less famous gardeners – the mother, sisters, and workers lost in the background of most traditional Darwin biographies – are inseparably connected with Darwin’s own. Uplifting, tragic, revelatory, and frustratingly opaque, each story is also a vital strand in the garden’s larger plot – and the story of a place is always bigger than that of an individual. The garden bears the imprints of all the lives it has known” (pg. 3). She continues, “Though it has only ever been a patch of Shropshire ground, one now forgotten and neglected, the garden has the power to reveal not only the roots of Darwin’s collaborative, domestic methodologies, but a localised section of the ‘complex and radiating lines’ that bind all things together: that ‘inextricable web’ first glimpsed within its range” (pg. 3). Piesse alternates between history, historiography, and memoir, describing her life adjacent to the garden and how she communed with its nature while researching sources and following her intellectual curiosity.

Describing the place of the Darwin family’s Shropshire garden in the family history, Piesse writes, “The Mount’s height attested to new scales of ambition: to the aspirations of a generation of new-age classicists who threw Etruscan posts to delight crowds and who were not afraid to build utopias in the shires, just as other men linked to their intellectual circles were founding them in a newly independent America. The Mount also reflected the Darwin-Wedgwood family’s progressive global vision in the colourful blooms and unusual forms of its exotic plants and shrubs” (pg. 56). She continues, linking the garden to the larger world, “The Mount was a vision of science, empire, and industry – combining the heights of classical aspiration with the expanding geographical range and scientific vision of modern empire. It reeled in a thousand journeys of conquest and anchored them deep in Shropshire flowerbeds” (pg. 57). The garden also connected to the changing class and land statuses in England at the time. As Piesse writes, “The paradox of the nineteenth-century gardener was that though the fruits of his labour were quite literally on display – sometimes quite opulently so in the form of peaches, oranges, and pines – the labour itself was supposed to be hidden” (pg. 140).

Discussing the archival research process, Piesse writes, “By my third day in the Cambridge University Manuscripts Reading Room I am half-crazed and bleary-eyed… I feel obliged to work from nine am to half past six and to attend to everything, and this takes its toll on my sense of proportion… Even when I break for lunch in the dazzling primary-coloured café nearby, I find myself mumbling unbidden enthusiasms down the phone about marvellous sketches of jaguars and weaving women made by the Beagle’s artist, Conrad Martens. I wonder, not for the first time, what combination of curiosity, ambition, compulsion, hubris, imagination, empathy, or common nerdery is driving me to do this” (pg. 116). This autobiographical quality of Piesse’s writing adds a level of authenticity to her study. For example, Piesse describes her hesitancy in writing about Darwin due to the territoriality of academia and her own status as an outsider to the sciences, though she argues that this gives her a unique perspective (pgs.148-149). This outsider status, however, helps her to view the material with a different eye. She notes how Darwin himself brought a literary talent to his scientific discussions: “Darwin understood something else as well, something that most practitioners of science before the age of disciplinary specialisation understood better than we do today. He understood that though science was the best way of knowing the world, it did not provide the best means of expressing that knowledge. He had, from his wide reading, his irksome classical education, his long-ingrained and highly developed habit of writing everything from memoir to travelogues, and his undimmed imaginative faculty, the power of analogy, metaphor, and rhetoric at his fingertips” (pg. 265).

Piesse finds in the garden the origins of Darwin’s methods for visualizing an interconnected world of life. She writes, “Just as The Mount furnished Darwin with the perspectives and habits he needed to understand alien worlds, so too did it give him the important capacity to feel it. Darwin’s methods in the field are seriously, playfully, sensual. For Darwin, touching, tasting, and smelling was as valid a way of knowing as measuring” (pg. 101). Further, “The Mount was an important testing ground for later modes of collaborative work with gardeners, family members, pigeon fanciers, servants, and other that would be developed and augmented once Darwin had his own ample gardens, hothouses, and employees at Down. It is not really surprising that gardens should prove to be so conducive to these horizontal modes of relationship” (pg. 152). Piesse finds evidence of this collaboration throughout the Darwin family’s correspondence as well as deeds, wills, and other records of the time.

Piesse concludes with an examination of how an historical understanding of gardens, informed by Darwin, may help us to rethink our own relationships with nature. She writes, “I am still drawn to this vision of the garden as a kind of new commons. It appeals to the stubborn romantic in me that wants to believe this sort of community with other people and with nature is still possible, but also to the stubborn contrarian that doesn’t like to hear no. Providing the winds are behind it and the timing is right, the garden could still be a site of shared stories, branching into the future like an old apple tree” (pg. 240). More to the point, the garden reveals the impacts of climate change. As Piesse notes, “My generation will be the first to grow old as the earth unravels and it feels like a harsh magnification of our mortality. All the usual ways of tying finite individual lives to larger cultural and biological futurities – the families nurtured, the new shops opened, the books produced – feel radically undone” (pg. 250). The way living things share space in a garden models our own world on a small scale. Piesse concludes, “If all individuals and species must ‘struggle together’, as Darwin notes, then the emphasis falls on the final word” (pg. 255).

Piesse’s The Ghost in the Garden reveals a new way of thinking about Charles Darwin and his world as well as connecting it to our own times and understanding of nature. Her focus on connections creates a particularly poignant and timely narrative that will appeal to historians, climate scientists, and amateur gardeners alike. Best read in a garden in the green light of sun filtering through leaves. ( )