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From J. D. Hooker   12 June 1881

Royal Gardens Kew

June 12/81.

Dear Darwin

Can you conveniently send me a few plants of Oxalis Corniculata—to grow— we are quite out of it—& you have plenty near you.—1

I am groaning as usual,—now under the incubus of the Sectional Presidency of the B. A. for York (Geography)—which I was ass enough to accept—because of Lubbock.2

Kew is becoming more toilsome than ever, & I can rarely get an hour for “Genera Plantm”, for which I have been doing the Palms for 16 months at least—; the most difficult task I ever undertook.3 They are evidently a very ancient group & much dislocated. Structurally and geographically.

My wife is vastly the better for her Italian trip, though the good of it is not likely to last long under the hurry & worry of this “House of call of all nations”— She is enquiring about a Farm house at Knock-holt to take the children to in Autumn— Should she fail in her enquiries she may ask Mrs Darwin if she knows of any place for them in your neighbourhood.4

Ever affy Yrs | Jos. D. Hooker.

Footnotes

1
Oxalis corniculata is creeping wood sorrel; CD had studied the movement of its cotyledons when he was working on Movement in plants (see, for example, Correspondence vol. 26, letter to W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, 18 June [1878]).
2
Hooker was president of the geography section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which met at York from 31 August to 7 September 1881; John Lubbock was the president in 1881 (Report of the 51st meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held at York (1881)).
3
Hooker’s section on palms appeared in Genera plantarum in 1883 (Bentham and Hooker 1862–83, 3 (pt 2): 870–948).
4
Hyacinth Hooker had travelled to Italy in the spring of 1881 with Hooker and Asa and Jane Loring Gray (see letter from J. D. Hooker, 24 February [1881]). Knockholt, Kent, is several miles south-east of Down, where the Darwins lived. It is near the landmark known as the Knockholt Beeches, a ‘remarkably fine’ clump of old trees on the high ground of a chalk plateau (Page ed. 1908, p. 478). The younger Hooker children were Reginald Hawthorn Hooker, Grace Ellen Hooker, and Joseph Symonds Hooker.

Bibliography

Bentham, George and Hooker, Joseph Dalton. 1862–83. Genera plantarum. Ad exemplaria imprimis in herbariis Kewensibus servata definita. 3 vols. in 7. London: A. Black [and others].

Movement in plants: The power of movement in plants. By Charles Darwin. Assisted by Francis Darwin. London: John Murray. 1880.

Page, William, ed. 1908. The Victoria history of the county of Kent, vol. 1. London: Archibald Constable.

Summary

Has struggled for months with complexity of structure and distribution of palms for Genera plantarum.

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-13201
From
Joseph Dalton Hooker
To
Charles Robert Darwin
Sent from
Kew
Source of text
DAR 104: 150–1
Physical description
ALS 3pp

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 13201,” accessed on 19 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-13201.xml

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