Darwin’s Lotus

Lotus photograph by Martin Boulanger

A gentle breeze, a splash of carp, and once upon a time a beautiful princess wavered on the water, her petals as bright and soft as flames. Sunlight, turtles, heavy rains, nights full of crickets and frogs, the lotus going to seed, her seeds nestling in the hard white pearl of a berry, the berry nestling inside the small silver flashes of a fish, the little silver fish nestling inside a larger fish of blue, this incredible fish of blue swimming half a world away, nestling in the crop of a grey heron, the bird washing ashore in the cold tangles of netting and fishing lines. And because a story is a story, an old man found her there among the mussel beds, his dogs nosing that dead lump of cords as the tide ran out.

He’d lived nearly all his life along these estuaries south of London. His Beagle days long behind him, he walked the shore as if in a photograph, man small against the sea and sky, great white beard in the wind, bowler hat, eyebrows like willows draping his eyes. Needless to say, he untangled the bird from the nets, cleaned the weeds from her face, smoothed her cold feathers along the grain of her neck. He carried her home in an old field bag, stink of brine trailing behind him, everyone stopping to watch the man pass.

Who knew new such ardor could spring up around something as useless as orchids or the beaks of finches? But it did, at times, and one could hardly live in the county of Kent without an opinion of the man and his books and lectures. Some felt strongly about the matter, but most simply shook their heads and called him touched or cracked, the barest glimpse of the man often enough to lift the collective spirit of the town. None ever doubted the old man’s genius, of course—the memberships, the honors, the visitors—yet most came to believe that his were gifts from which they had all been largely spared, his presence somehow filling them each with a sense of gratitude for their own particular lots in life.

Women in doorways, children in windows, even horses stopped to look, the old naturalist stooped and shuffling along the paving stones of the gutters, a staged quality to it all, the pair of dogs beside him, the man with his head down as he walked, his eyes lowered under the brim of his hat, his thoughts with the heron in the bag on his shoulder, the sour smell of fish he could practically taste.

Home, his wife, Emma, in the doorway, the woman with her hands on her hips, yelling for the dogs to stay out, telling him not to even think of coming inside this front door. You’re not bringing that thing into my house, she told him. The old man laughed as he held the bird out to her; the old woman followed him a few steps around the house, trailing behind him, the music of her voice, calling for the man to keep it moving, keep it going all the way around the house, all the way to his room, his study, his museum, as she called it, a kind of laboratory opening onto the back of the house.

This was Down House—a rambling country house south and east of London—the man’s life almost monastic in its devotion to the natural world, his days full of writing and correspondence, his notebooks full of pigeons and ferns and earthworms and whatever else occupied his mind: a quick note about three rare beetles taken in the parish today; plans to set a ‘wormstone’ under the chestnut tree [to] measure soil displacement and determine role of earthworms in soil formation; Apr 22, Have been frittering my time for the last several weeks in wearisome manner, partly idleness, and odds and ends, and sending ten thousand barnacles out of the house all over the world… shall in...