Erasmus Darwin's Gardens. Medicine, Agriculture and the Sciences in the Eighteenth Century: by Paul Elliott, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2021, xii + 347 pp., £40.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-78327-610-3.

The garden at Full Street is reconstructed through maps, correspondence, botanical works, and a notebook in the Darwin papers in Cambridge University Library listing the plants and where they were grown. Whilst the fact of these gardens is not new, Elliott recreates these spaces and their uses - for pleasure, medical and scientific enquiry - in fresh detail. However, the way in which Erasmus' theories of evolution anticipated those of his grandson is one of the prisms through which the elder Darwin's contribution to science is revealed. [Extracted from the article]