This lecture examines the work of Hugo de Vries, a Dutch botanist who was one of the first to claim that science would allow plants and animals to be designed to order.

It also looks at the early twentieth-century ‘Station for Experimental Evolution’ in New York, and at the utopian vision of Charlotte Gilman Perkins’ Herland (1915), a novel describing a lost world populated by women that took the form of a perfect garden, whose wonderful plants and lack of men were both explained by de Vries’ theory of mutation.

A lecture by Jim Endersby 10 February

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/making-new-plants

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.

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