Grey Granite and her friend, Dr Anne, were privileged, as a result of recent life choices, to be able to visit RHS Chelsea on Members Day. This was a truly memorable, life enhancing experience, Grey Granite particularly appreciated visiting Chelsea in this the International Year of Biodiversity, when almost all the garden exhibits reflected the importance of conserving species which support wildlife and of gardening in harmony with the environment. Grey Granite was excited by the vast palette of informal plantings and has come home enthused and inspired. She is reassured of the validity of her Darwinian Bank, an area of garden which has been planted to reflect the penultimate paragraph of Origin of Species, and she intends to develop this concept further.'It is interesting to contemplate a tangled 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 upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life'
Charles Darwin, The origin of Species, 1859
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