Experts now agree that Downe Bank encapsulates the species-rich setting that inspired Darwin’s poetic conclusion to The Origin of Species. The theme of an 'entangled bank’ carries a universal message
that has inspired ecologists
and provided a model for our understanding of the natural world.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us .... and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. Charles Darwin
Linking the woodlands throughout the site are species–rich hedgerows and belts of woodland known locally as shaws. Many of these were left hundreds of years ago when land on either side was cleared of trees for farming. As well as marking boundaries and keeping animals from straying, the shaws and hedgerows were valuable sources of wood for fuel, fencing and furniture for the local people. They were also often refuges for plants and animals of semi-natural ancient woodland such as bluebells and dormice. Many of the hedges were laid every 15-20 years so they remained thick and stockproof. When Emma Darwin first moved to Downe she wrote, ‘At the edge of the table land on which the village and house stand are steep valleys crowned at the top with old hedges & hedgerows very disorderly & picturesque & with enormous clusters of Clematis & blackberries and a great variety of yews, services &c’ (Emma Darwin, notes on Down House and neighbourhood, CUL DAR 251).
Species typical of hedgerows and studied by Darwin in the Site were black bryony, white bryony and spindle, which can still be found, often in the same places where he studied them. In his book on different climbing plants, ‘The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants’ (published in 1865), Darwin described how black bryony twines towards the sun, but the tendrils of white bryony are stimulated by touch. He reported how the spiral contractions of white bryony tendrils (see photograph) result in a spring-like mechanism and suggested that this acts as a shock absorber protecting the branches from being torn away from their supports in high winds. He wrote,
‘I have more than once gone on purpose during a gale to watch a Bryony growing in an exposed hedge, with its tendrils attached to the surrounding bushes; and as the thick and thin branches were tossed to and fro by the wind, the tendrils, had they not been excessively elastic, would instantly have been torn off and the plant thrown prostrate. But as it was, the Bryony safely rode out the gale, like a ship with two anchors down, and with a long range of cable ahead to serve as a spring as she surges to the storm’.
Caught tendril of Bryonia dioica. Note the straightened portion where the spiralling direction is reversed, a device, Darwin explained, by which self-twisting is avoided.
