Sainsbury Laboratory at Cambridge University, by Stanton
Williams This laboratory in the University of Cambridge’s
Botanic Gardens is the ideal habitat for botanists ’One man with
half-a-dozen flower-pots may do more towards advancing botany
than another will attempt with 20 or 30 acres of garden,”
declared John Stevens Henslow – professor of botany and tutor to
Charles Darwin – in an impassioned address to fellow members of
the University of Cambridge in 1830. “But the larger the number
of living species that are cultivated in a Botanic Garden, the
greater will be the facilities afforded to us all; not merely
for systematic improvement, but for anatomical and other
experimental researches essential to the progress of general
physiology.” This was a radical proposition. For Henslow, the
botanic garden was to be a site of research into the fundamental
structures and properties of plants themselves – a novel
pursuit. He had spent the previous five years campaigning to
secure an expanded 16ha site to replace the