Susannah Wedgwood Darwin (1765-1817)

The ghost in Charles Darwin's garden

Charles Darwin (1809-1882), chalk drawing by Ellen Sharples (1769-1849) ©Down House, courtesy of G.P. Darwin, Darwin Heirlooms Trust. The earliest known portrait of Darwin, he is proudly holding a plant which he might have been about to give to his mother.

It’s Mothering Sunday in the UK, the day in early spring in which mothers are celebrated, and traditionally gifts of flowers or plants are given by their children. This week’s post is about Susannah Wedgwood Darwin (1765-1817), the mother of Charles Darwin. Susannah’s influence on her naturalist son is often overlooked, partly because she died when he was only eight. But her vital presence was connected to some of his happiest childhood memories: being at her side in the family’s Shropshire garden, watching her close attention to plants and flowers, learning from her.

R. T. Pritchett, reproduction of frontispiece from Darwin, Charles (1890), Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the various countries visited by H.M.S. Beagle etc., London: John Murray (The Voyage of the Beagle)

In September 1833, twenty-four-year-old Charles Darwin was in Buenos Aires, Argentina, staying at the home of the British merchant Edward Lumb, his wife Elizabeth, and their children. After almost two years of adventures on the HMS Beagle, followed by many months of travelling around South America, Charles felt suddenly homesick in this English family home for the people and places he had left behind. ‘It is now the Spring of the year, & every thing is budding & fresh, but how great a difference between this & the beautiful scenes of England,’ he wrote to his older sister Caroline.

I often think of the Garden at home as a Paradise; on a fine summers evening, when the birds are singing how I should enjoy to appear, like a Ghost amongst you, whilst working with the flowers.— These are pleasures I have to view, through the long interval of the Pacific & Indian oceans.

Darwin’s ‘Garden at home’ was at The Mount, near Shrewsbury in Shropshire, where Charles Darwin and his sisters had grown up. This much-loved garden was a subtle but distinct presence throughout the great naturalist’s life. In The Ghost in the Garden: in search of Darwin’s lost garden (2021) the academic and writer Jude Piesse explores the Shropshire garden’s ‘foundational’ influence on Darwin’s writings. ‘If a place can be said to follow a man, then the garden at The Mount followed Darwin to the last,’ she writes.