Cambridge revives Henslow's 1827 botany course that shaped Darwin
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- Cambridge University Botanic Garden is launching a four-week summer course in botany that uses Prof John Stevens Henslow's original specimens, ink drawings and watercolours, stored in the university's herbarium for nearly 200 years, with some watercolours published for the first time in the Guardian.
- Charles Darwin attended Henslow's groundbreaking five-week course three years in a row after arriving at Cambridge in 1828, and Henslow introduced him to the concept of variation in plants — "laying the foundation for Darwin's later theory of evolution," according to Dr Raphaella Hull, CUBG's acting head of learning.
- When offered the naturalist post on HMS Beagle in 1831, Henslow declined and recommended 22-year-old Darwin instead; the two remained lifelong friends, with Darwin posting specimens back to his old mentor from the voyage.
- Prof Sam Brockington, CUBG curator, said botany has "all but disappeared" as a standalone undergraduate degree in the UK, leaving a gap in how ecologists, horticulturists and conservation researchers are trained to identify and describe plant form and diversity.
- The new course mirrors Henslow's 19th-century method — dissection, hands-on specimen examination, and herborising field excursions to the Cambridgeshire habitats Darwin visited — with Brockington noting that when CUBG designed its ideal curriculum and compared it to Henslow's, "the overlap was remarkable."
- Henslow began offering his annual Cambridge botany course in 1827, and before that no botany lectures had been delivered at the university for decades; CUBG's revival explicitly frames the subject as the same "essential stepping stone to more important discoveries" Henslow saw it as nearly 200 years ago.
Why it matters: Botany has "all but disappeared" as a standalone UK undergraduate degree, according to CUBG curator Prof Sam Brockington, leaving ecology and conservation students without foundational species-identification skills. The four-week course, aimed at undergraduates, postgraduates and professionals in ecology, horticulture and conservation, directly targets that training gap using the same hands-on dissection and field-excursion approach Henslow pioneered — and which Darwin credited with influencing his entire career.
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