![[Above: Charles Darwin’s “sand walk,” Downes, England]*** Star after star from Heaven’s high arch shall rush,Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,Heading, extinct, to one dark centre fall,And Death and Night and Chaos mingle all!—Till o’er the wreck, emerging from the storm,Immortal NATURE lifts her changeful form,Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flameAnd soars and shines, another and the same.[from “The Botanic Garden,” by Erasmus Darwin]Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was Charles Darwin’s paternal grandfather. A medical doctor and extraordinary naturalist, the elder Darwin foreshadowed his grandson in many ways. Long before Charles wrestled with the implications of his great theory, Erasmus flirted with atheism in his studies of the diversification of species over the course of geological history. He celebrated the primacy of the “laws of nature” in long poems entitled “The Economy of Vegetation” and “The Loves of Plants,” later collected as The Botanic Garden.These wonderfully bombastic, oddly-Miltonic verses have never struck me as they did the other day, after a trip to the verdant yet ecologically ravaged slopes of the most isolated island archipelago in the world, Hawaii, where visitors find themselves besieged by introduced species from cardinals to mongooses. Erasmus crops up in a fascinating essay, “Where Are The Wild Things?” by James J. White, curator at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, which opens Paradisus: Hawaiian Plant Watercolors, a thrillingly gorgeous book by Geraldine King Tam. Now in her late 80s, at her home on Kauai, Ms. Tam paints with botanical accuracy and beauty the welter of proliferating non-native and struggling native plants of the Hawaiian Islands, while White’s essay compresses thousands of years of violently wrenching disturbance that a single “fruit-eating” primate species has wrought, from initial “protogardens” created by small groups of Homo sapiens pooping out seeds in sacred groves to the world-altering “ecological aggressors” we have become, virtually erasing the original flora of these and other islands.“Systems systems crush,” indeed![CF]](http://28.media.tumblr.com/vLYlHQGVt9h407peMEPk9DwI_500.jpg)
[Above: Charles Darwin’s “sand walk,” Downes, England]
***
Star after star from Heaven’s high arch shall rush,
Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,
Heading, extinct, to one dark centre fall,
And Death and Night and Chaos mingle all!
—Till o’er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal NATURE lifts her changeful form,
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame
And soars and shines, another and the same.
[from “The Botanic Garden,” by Erasmus Darwin]
Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was Charles Darwin’s paternal grandfather. A medical doctor and extraordinary naturalist, the elder Darwin foreshadowed his grandson in many ways. Long before Charles wrestled with the implications of his great theory, Erasmus flirted with atheism in his studies of the diversification of species over the course of geological history. He celebrated the primacy of the “laws of nature” in long poems entitled “The Economy of Vegetation” and “The Loves of Plants,” later collected as The Botanic Garden.
These wonderfully bombastic, oddly-Miltonic verses have never struck me as they did the other day, after a trip to the verdant yet ecologically ravaged slopes of the most isolated island archipelago in the world, Hawaii, where visitors find themselves besieged by introduced species from cardinals to mongooses. Erasmus crops up in a fascinating essay, “Where Are The Wild Things?” by James J. White, curator at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, which opens Paradisus: Hawaiian Plant Watercolors, a thrillingly gorgeous book by Geraldine King Tam. Now in her late 80s, at her home on Kauai, Ms. Tam paints with botanical accuracy and beauty the welter of proliferating non-native and struggling native plants of the Hawaiian Islands, while White’s essay compresses thousands of years of violently wrenching disturbance that a single “fruit-eating” primate species has wrought, from initial “protogardens” created by small groups of Homo sapiens pooping out seeds in sacred groves to the world-altering “ecological aggressors” we have become, virtually erasing the original flora of these and other islands.
“Systems systems crush,” indeed!
[CF]
