According to an article in the BBC Science News, The Darwin family will repeat the flower count. To honor their ancestor, the descendants of Charles Darwin are “retracing his footsteps by surveying wild flowers in the meadows around his former home at Down House in Kent.”
Begun in June of 1855, Charles Darwin studied local plants as part of beginning his theory on evolution, and this summer, his family will walk through the same fields, counting the descendents of those same flowers, in a way. The three generations of the Darwin family – aged from 21 months to 78 years – will repeat his original survey in an effort to show how “flowering plants have changed over the past 150 years.” This is considered the first “biodiversity audit in history”.
Scientists from the Natural History Museum and conservationists from English Heritage will help with the survey.