Darwin's Most Wonderful Plants: Darwin's Botany Today

Thompson, K. · 2018 · Profile Books

Edition: 1st
ISBN: 9781788160261
Pages: 256
Tier: Recommended
Audience: For all readers
Rating: 4.5 / 5

There is a particular pleasure in being told that something you have walked past every day for years is, on inspection, doing something remarkable. Ken Thompson’s Darwin’s Most Wonderful Plants is two hundred and fifty pages of that pleasure. It is a tour of Darwin’s six botanical books — The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants, Insectivorous Plants, Orchids, Cross and Self Fertilisation, The Power of Movement in Plants, and the strange final volume on earthworms — and what it really is, underneath the structure, is an extended demonstration of how to look properly at a plant.

This is not, on its own, a horticultural book. There is almost no care advice in it. What it gives you instead is the habit of attention that underlies care advice — the habit of asking why a plant is doing what it is doing, and then sitting with the question long enough for the answer to start to assemble itself.

What it argues

Thompson’s argument is implicit rather than stated, and it is the right one. It is that Darwin’s botanical work is undersold because the Origin is so famous that everything else he wrote gets sized against it and found small — which is the wrong measure entirely. The botanical books were not minor side-projects. They were decades of patient experimental work on questions that no one else was asking, and many of the answers Darwin arrived at have stood for a hundred and fifty years.

The book proceeds by giving each of Darwin’s six botanical works a chapter of its own, summarising what Darwin actually did, and then layering on what modern research has confirmed, refined, or replaced. When the layering works — as it does for the climbing plants chapter and the orchids chapter — the effect is almost vertiginous. You see the original observations clearly, then you see them through the lens of contemporary plant physiology, and the gap between the two collapses into a single arc of accumulated understanding.

How it’s structured

Climbing plants (~40pp) — twiners, tendril-bearers, root climbers, leaf climbers; the handedness of helices; the mechanics of contact-coiling
Insectivorous plants (~40pp) — Drosera, Venus flytrap, Utricularia; experimental designs on trap closure and digestion
Orchids (~40pp) — pollination mechanisms, the lip as a landing platform, deceit pollination
Cross- and self-fertilisation (~30pp) — the evolutionary cost of inbreeding, heterostyly
Plant movement (~50pp) — circumnutation, phototropism, gravitropism, sleep movements
Worms (~20pp) — soil formation, observation of earthworm behaviour, Darwin’s own garden

Each chapter ends with a “what we know now” section of varying length and depth, which is where Thompson does his most useful work as a synthesiser.

Where it’s right

The climbing-plants chapter is the book’s crown jewel and the reason most readers fall in love with it. The question of why climbing plants wrap around things at all — rather than simply growing straight up — is one of those questions that sits in plain sight until somebody asks it, at which point it becomes immediately fascinating. Thompson’s account of Darwin’s experiments here (tying tendrils to glass rods, watching them fail to coil; offering them rough surfaces, watching them succeed) is the cleanest summary I know.

And then there is the helix question. The overwhelming majority of twining plants — runner beans, morning glory, honeysuckle — spiral right-handed when viewed from above. A small minority — hops, bindweed — spiral left-handed. Why? Darwin asked. The answer, which Thompson teases out over several pages, turns out to involve a combination of cellular asymmetry in the growing tip, gravitational sensing, and circumnutation rhythms that bias the search for support in one direction. It is not a complete answer even now — the molecular biology of left-versus-right twining is genuinely unresolved — but the framework for asking the question is Darwin’s, and Thompson lays it out with exactly the right amount of detail. You finish the chapter able to look at any climbing plant in your garden and pick out features you’d never registered before.

The orchids chapter does similar work. Darwin’s argument that orchid flowers are extraordinarily elaborate insect-handling machines — each species evolved to deposit pollen on a precise location on a specific pollinator’s body — was, at the time, audacious. Modern molecular work has only deepened the picture: orchid-pollinator coevolution is one of the most beautiful examples we have of reciprocal selection. Thompson handles the update well without losing Darwin’s original wonder.

The insectivorous-plants chapter is the most experimentally rigorous in Darwin’s botanical writing, and Thompson honours it by walking the reader through the actual experimental designs. Darwin really did test what Drosera tentacles would respond to — meat, milk, glass, paper, the weight of a human hair — and the systematic care of those experiments is genuinely affecting. This is what real science looked like before kit catalogues, ethics committees, and grant funding. It looked like a man with a hand lens and a lot of patience.

The book is also right about the meta-point. There is an assumption, particularly common among casual readers of science, that the great discoveries are now behind us and that everything left is a matter of refinement with expensive instruments. Thompson quietly demolishes this. Darwin’s botanical experiments could in principle be repeated today by any patient amateur with a windowsill — the equipment hasn’t changed, only the molecular follow-up has. What is rare now is the patience.

Where it’s incomplete

The book has three real weaknesses, all worth flagging:

The modern-update sections are uneven. The climbing-plants and orchids chapters get genuine current literature. The worms chapter gets almost none — which is unfortunate, because the post-2000 explosion in soil-biology research (rhizosphere, microbial-network mapping, carbon cycling) is exactly where Darwin’s final book has been most thoroughly extended. A reader closing the worms chapter has no real sense of the modern picture.

Thompson sometimes lets Darwin off the hook. Darwin was wrong about a number of things in the botanical books — most notably pangenesis, his theory of inheritance, which underlies parts of the Cross-Fertilisation book and is now of historical interest only. Thompson notes this in passing but doesn’t quite do the work of separating Darwin’s lasting contributions from his speculative misfires. A more clinical writer would have made the boundaries cleaner.

The book is a substitute for reading Darwin, not a companion to it. Anyone whose appetite Thompson whets should go directly to Darwin’s actual texts — The Power of Movement in Plants is dense but rewarding, Climbing Plants is short and brilliant. Thompson is the introduction. The originals are still where the real work was done.

How we’ll use it

In our writing, Thompson will function as a citation route into Darwin’s primary botanical work. Where we want to make a point about climbing-plant mechanics, leaf movement, or pollination ecology in plain language for a non-academic reader, Thompson is the friendlier source to recommend — and the chain of citations from his bibliography back to Darwin’s actual experiments is straightforward to follow.

More than that, the book is a model for the voice we want on the site. The combination of warm attention, honest scientific framing, and willingness to dwell on a small wonder until the reader sees it too — that is the register that good plant writing lives in. We will be quietly imitating it.

Who should read it

Everyone. This is the rare book that genuinely justifies “all audiences” as an answer. A beginner gardener will come away with a richer sense of what their plants are doing between the times they are being watered. An intermediate gardener will pick up specific mechanisms — tendril contact-coiling, stomatal rhythms — that will sharpen their reading of the plants in front of them. A specialist will enjoy Thompson’s selection of which Darwin experiments to highlight even if they already know them all.

Most of all, anyone who has ever caught themselves staring at a runner bean spiral and wondering but why — this book is for that person, in particular.

The bottom line

A small modern classic that does what it sets out to do — open Darwin’s botanical writing to a contemporary reader without flattening it. The climbing-plants chapter is worth the cover price on its own; the rest of the book is a sustained argument for the value of patient attention as a research method. If the Library section had a manifesto, this book would be most of it.

Reviewed 2026-05-27. Edition: 1st (2018). ISBN: 9781788160261.

Strengths

· Surfaces things you'd never notice on your own — tendril handedness, circumnutation, the geometry of orchid lips — as if Darwin were standing behind you pointing them out.
· The chapter on climbing plants is the best plain-English treatment of helical handedness in print: why most twiners go right, why a small minority don't, and what the experiments actually showed.
· Honest about how much Darwin worked out with a hand lens, a window sill, and decades of patient observation — a useful corrective to the assumption that real science requires modern instruments.
· Modern follow-up sections at chapter ends are well-judged: where Darwin was right, where the molecular picture has filled in the mechanism, and where he was simply wrong.
· Thompson's voice is warm without being twee — the writing trusts the reader to find the science interesting on its own merits.

Limitations

· The modern-update sections are uneven — some chapters get genuine current literature, others a single paragraph that gestures at recent work.
· Occasional hagiographic moments: when Darwin was wrong (pangenesis, some plant-movement speculation), Thompson moves on quickly rather than dwelling.
· The book assumes you'll trust Thompson's reading of Darwin's primary texts rather than reading them yourself — useful as an entry point, but no substitute for *The Power of Movement in Plants* if you actually want to see how Darwin built an argument.
· Worms chapter feels slightly out of place — it is the most distant of Darwin's botanical works from the others and the modern soil-biology updates are particularly thin.