Darwin’s Garden: An evolutionary adventure goes beyond the Finches and brings the evolution of plants, as well as their role in Darwin’s work to life.

Being downright cheap, I have to first complain about the entrance fee ($20!). Also the overheard comments, some funny (more than one father threatened his offspring with a “survival of the fittest” test, which isn’t all that hard to arrange in the Bronx), some, more discursive (“well, what I see in this variety is God’s hand”).

The highlight was a recreated Darwin garden, complete with a wendy-house like Down House facade with matching idyllic English garden and various experiments to demonstrate some of Darwin’s work with plants.

Down House playhouse

Thus Venus Fly Traps had been fed leaves vs flies (this seems a tad cruel to many of the concerned parties), plants had been carefully placed on their side to test geotropism and male and female primrose’s were left for comparison in proximities where chaperones were possibly required.

Primulae playing innocent

I also learned some humanizing things: finding his hands each occupied with a beetle when he espied a third interesting coleopteran, Darwin popped one into his mouth for safekeeping, upon which it squirted him with ‘acrid’ liquid and all beetles in question were lost. I also love that he had an experimental kitchen garden patch, off-limits for prandial activity. Most of all Darwin had a number of walks in the vicinity of Down House, one of which he called his ‘thinking path’ (I’ve adopted this as my new word for the subway).

The event has other facets. The second is a sort of ‘hunt the plant’ around the acres of garden- at each station in seamless and simple terms you learn that Cycads are not what they seem, about the once world dominating Gingkos and more. Basically in a place like a botanical garden the message of adaptation is present in a blatant and in-your-face display by the resident flora and fauna, especially right now with the lilacs emitting a come-hither fragrance and bumble bees fully evidence as pollen-laden go-betweens. A third facet of the exhibit is a library collection we were denied access to (“oh that exhibition’s moved”, we were blatantly misinformed for $20), but it purportedly contains a treasure-trove of things we didn’t see.

Exhibition runs until June 25th.