The Rev. Professor J.S. Henslow (1796-1861) is best remembered as Charles Darwin’s tutor at Cambridge, where his inspired teaching fired Darwin’s great interest in the natural sciences. He secured for Darwin that all-important place on the voyage of the Beagle and acted as his friend and advisor throughout his life. But Henslow was also the Rector of Hitcham in Suffolk for 24 years, where he has left a unique legacy. He started botany classes for the children and adults of his parish and in the 1850s, partly to help and inspire the schoolchildren, he compiled a list of the flora of Hitcham. Copies of his lists survive in Cambridge, as do hundreds of his herbarium specimens in Ipswich Museum (which he helped to found in 1847). This is an extraordinarily early and full botanic record for a Suffolk parish.

Henslow’s legacy was reviewed a hundred years later by Alec Bull, the son of a Hitcham farmer and now a noted naturalist in Norfolk (a co-author of the 1999 Flora of Norfolk), who published an article in the Transactions of the Suffolk Naturalists Society in 1977 comparing the 1850s data with his own researches in the 1944-60 period. His data covered the crucial post-war years when there were great changes to the landscape and he was able to show changes in the flora.

Interest in Henslow has been renewed in this, the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s great work, On the Origin of Species, in 1859. A project is now being formulated by the Hitcham community and the Suffolk Biodiversity Partnership to undertake a new botanical survey of Hitcham and to consolidate the data from the two earlier surveys. The survey should be running in 2010, the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first Flora of Suffolk, which was co-authored by Henslow and mentions his Hitcham lists. Hopefully the new survey will be completed in 2011, the 150th anniversary of Henslow’s death.

The project will bring together an unrivalled 160 years of botanic information for a Suffolk parish. This will be a great resource for investigating changes over that period, some caused by the great changes to our farming landscape between the 1850s and now, and others perhaps indicative of climate change. It will also be a great asset in demonstrating the wide range of biodiversity contained within an ordinary Suffolk clayland parish. Suffolk’s claylands make up a large part of the county and are of great importance for their historic landscapes. However, they are largely devoid of designations for biological rarities and are thus perhaps underrepresented in considerations of Suffolk’s biodiversity. The project therefore has great potential, not least for inspiring a community’s interest in their biodiversity, something that would have pleased Henslow immensely.

The project is at an early stage of its planning and further details will be made available as it progresses.