The Voltage Gate: For Darwin Day: The Biogeography of Darwin's Gourd
The Voltage Gate • Feb 20, 2010In September of 1835, Charles Darwin was visiting an island of Floreana, one of the smaller islands in the Galapagos archipelago where he came across crawling beds of Sicyos villosus, a fairly typical member of the squashes and cucumbers (Cucurbitaceae). Darwin noted that the cucurbit was "injurious" to the surrounding vegetation, referring to its prolific takeover of the landscape nearby. Darwin sent a sample of S. villosus (pictured above) back to Great Britain along with 209 other plants from the Galapagos, where Joseph Hooker described it and since then, it's been sitting in one receptacle or another for the past… Full Story »
