Flora Unveiled

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“In the garden!” he said, wondering at himself. “In the garden! But the door is locked and

the key is buried deep.”

— Fr ances Hogdson BURNETT, The Secret Garden (1911)

18

Flora’s Secret Gardens

Unbeknownst to Wilhelm Hofmeister and his German colleagues, by 1838 Charles

Darwin in England had already formulated his basic theory of evolution by natural

selection:

I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to

appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long- continued

observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these

circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable

ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here,

then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.^1

However, it wasn’t until 1859 that Darwin, pressured by Alfred Russel Wallace, finally

got around to publishing his ideas in Origin of Species. By this time, the apparent taxo-

nomic divide based on their life cycles between the cryptogams and seed plants had at last

been resolved by Hofmeister. Indeed, had it not been resolved, it would have been difficult

for evolutionary morphologists to argue that seed plants had evolved from simpler, cryp-

togam- like ancestors. Julius von Sachs spoke for all botanists when he waxed rhapsodic in

describing Hofmeister’s stunning insights into the common features of the life cycles of

cryptogams and seed plants:

The results of the investigations published in the Comparative Investigations on the

Germination, Development and Fruit Formation of the Higher Cryptogams and Seed-

formation in Conifers in 1849 and 1851 were magnificent beyond all that has been

achieved before or since in the domain of descriptive botany; the merit of the many