Downe, England, is only 16 miles southeast of London, but one would think it was hundreds of miles away. Cows and horses graze in adjacent fields crisscrossed with bucolic footpaths, and people smile and acknowledge each other's presence as they pass on the street. A small stone church, St. Mary's, and a surrounding cemetery dating back to the 14th century sit at the hub of the village. Two pubs, the George and Dragon and the Queen's Head, offer hospitality, but to a biologist the most significant site is the white, squarish, Georgian-style mansion jutting three stories tall on Luxted Road, just on the outskirts of the village. If any site can be considered hallowed ground for those who study life, this is it, for this is where Charles Darwin lived, worked, and died.

Returning to England in 1836 after five years on HMS Beagle at the ripe old age of 27, Darwin settled into the role of independent scholar. He moved into a house on Great Marlborough Street in London, where he wrote a narrative of his travels, sorted out his extensive collections, and established relationships with the leading scientists of the day. During this time he married Emma Wedgewood, who also happened to be his first cousin. They set up housekeeping in Macaw Cottage on London's Upper Gower Street, and were soon the parents of two children, the first of ten, seven of whom were to survive childhood. Charles and Emma, having had enough of "dirty odious London," in 1842 moved to their new home in Downe, which they named Down House (the village was also named Down until the middle of the 19th century, when the spelling was changed to Downe).

Darwin did not initially find Down House very attractive. It "has somewhat of a desolate air" was his assessment of the setting for the house. As for the structure: "House ugly, looks neither old nor new," was his evaluation in a letter to his sister. However, he did see potential for improvement, including that it had space for a "capital study," and extensive grounds comprising approximately eighteen acres. The price was right, too, at about £2,200. Upon moving in, the Darwins immediately began a long series of improvements to both the structure and the grounds, and despite the inauspicious beginning, Darwin ended up spending the rest of his life at Down House, traveling only rarely.

Eventually the home included a greenhouse, a laboratory, the Sandwalk (a walking path that wound around a small forest planted by Darwin), manicured flower gardens, a meadow for grazing animals, a kitchen garden, a pigeon house, and tennis courts. It is here that Darwin raised his children, wrote his books, including On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, conducted innumerable ingenious experiments on a wide variety of plants and animals, and played a significant role in the local community, even serving as the local magistrate and holding court sessions at Down House.

Today, English Heritage, an agency of the British government that maintains important historical sites throughout Great Britain, owns Down House and makes it available to the public. English Heritage acquired Down House in 1996 from the Natural History Museum and embarked on a program to restore the house and grounds to look as they did during Darwin's life. The focal point of the fully restored house is the study, where Darwin spent a large part of each day writing, reading, and conducting experiments. In addition, the Victorian-era drawing room, dining room, and billiard room - Darwin was an avid devotee of the game - have been restored with many original furnishings.

The greenhouse has also been restored and is filled with pitcher plants, sundews, and Venus's flytraps, all carnivorous plants that Darwin investigated in great detail; he was the first to discover that these plants actually digest the insects that become ensnared in their various trapping mechanisms. Various climbing plants and an enormous collection of wild orchids are also to be found in the greenhouse.

The common thinking among botanists of Darwin's day was that most plants were self-fertilizing; Darwin, however, theorized that this could not be the case. He believed that sexual reproduction must be a necessary element in the generation of the wide variations found in plant structures, and he spent many hours with a fine paintbrush cross-fertilizing plants to make his case. In addition, he speculated on the nature of the natural pollinators of the orchids. One of his special interests was the comet orchid (Angraecum sesquipedale), which contains a 30-cm-long nectar-bearing spur that must be negotiated in order for fertilization to occur. Darwin proposed that a moth with a proboscis of similar length must exist that is specialized to pollinate this particular orchid. A moth with such a proboscis has now been discovered that lives in the same habitat as the orchid, although it remains controversial whether or not this moth is the actual pollinator of the comet orchid.

This year the major restoration project at Down House is the kitchen garden, where fruit, vegetables, and flowers were grown and where Darwin kept some experimental plots. The one-quarter-acre garden site is a long, narrow plot enclosed by walls on three sides and a hedge on the other. Darwin described it as "a detestable slip" upon first seeing it: "The soil looks wretched from the quantity of chalk flints."

"The kitchen garden provides a fascinating insight into Darwin's domestic life as well as his scientific work. Fruit, vegetables, and flowers from the plot provided food for the family, cut flowers for the house as well as materials for Darwin's experiments. It is this intriguing mixture of family and science that make the garden of such historic significance," said Nick Biddle, garden curator at Down House.

In Darwin's day the garden included strawberries, potatoes, peas, beans, cabbage, borecoles (a type of open-leafed cabbage), tree cabbage, turnip-rooted cabbage, and brussels sprouts, as well as nuts, roses, and snapdragons. The Darwin family must have been especially fond of gooseberry pie, gooseberry jam, and gooseberries in all forms, because the garden also contained at least 53 different varieties of the fruit, including red, green, white, yellow, smooth, and hairy gooseberries.

"We plan to recreate the garden using many of the historic varieties of the period, as well as some modern disease-resistant varieties," said Biddle. It was the kitchen garden where Darwin conducted experiments on the variation of common vegetables. As he noted in his 1868 book The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, "I planted 18 kinds [of potato, Solanum tuberosum] in adjoining rows; their stems and leaves differed but little, and in several cases there was as great a difference between the individuals of the same variety as between the different varieties." If only Darwin could have discussed his work with Gregor Mendel, who at about the same time was in Moravia conducting experiments on the inheritance of variations of the common garden pea.

One of the most fascinating finds in the garden at Down House is the worm stone. Darwin had a long fascination with earthworms and devised many unusual experiments to study them, including exposing them to Emma Darwin's piano playing to determine if they could sense the music - there was no indication that they could. The worm stone was an instrument, devised with the help of his son Horace, to measure the rate at which earthworms displace the soil. The idea was to place a stone on the surface of the ground above a site with a significant number of earthworms. As the worms passed under the stone and each ingested a tiny amount of the soil, the soil under the stone would be displaced as the worm moved, causing the stone to sink slowly into the ground.

The actual worm stone was a round millstone some 15 to 20 inches in diameter with a hole in the center that was placed flush with the ground. A long metal rod was driven into the ground through the center hole, making it relatively immobile and thus useful as a reference for the movement of the stone. At regular intervals Charles and Horace would measure the height of the stone in relation to the top of the metal rod. Initially, they found that the roots from nearby trees were pushing the stone up at a faster rate than the action of the earthworms caused it to sink. Eventually, however, they found just the right spot where the action of the earthworms could be detected. In his last book, Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, with Observations of Their Habits, published in 1881, the year before his death, Darwin reported that the action of the worms caused the stone to sink at a rate of 2.2 millimeters per year. By extrapolating from this measurement, Darwin estimated that on every acre of his land some eighteen tons of soil was brought to the surface annually by the action of earthworms.

It was this childlike enthusiasm for investigating life that made Charles Darwin a great man, noted Nick Biddle. "Darwin, the man who shook up our universe, spent the last two years of his life studying earthworms. That shows how brilliant he really was."