That so great a man as Charles Darwin could be so well liked by his contemporaries was due in no small part to his natural modesty. On scientific matters, as in everyday life, he was approachable, naturally tending throughout his life to assume the part of the eager student rather than the overbearing teacher. His modesty was nowhere more marked than in his attitude to botany. On being elected to the illustrious French Institute in 1878, he wrote to his old friend Asa Gray, ‘It is rather a good joke that I should be elected in the Botanical Section, as the extent of my knowledge is little more than that a daisy is a compositous plant, and a pea a leguminous one’. To the very end of his life he protested that he was not a botanist; or he would have people believe that he was, ‘one of those botanists who do not know one plant from another’. Such claims fooled few of his contemporaries. Charles was not as botanically naïve as he would have had others believe.

From earliest childhood, he had learned and read extensively about plants and the botanical discoveries of explorers, such as Joseph Banks and Alexander von Humbolt – he particularly admired the latter's books and re-read them several times. He did not study botany in any formal sense while at Cambridge, but he had forged an exceptionally close relationship with the Professor of Botany. After leaving the university, he had studied the plants of South America during the voyage of the Beagle and when he settled with Emma at Down House he immediately began to use his garden and greenhouse to make extensive observations on botanical phenomena as diverse as mechanisms of pollination and the dynamics of seedling establishment. As this and the next chapter will demonstrate, Charles's comments were, for once in his life, intended to mislead.