28 August 2026

Walking through town today it felt as though default settings had been restored -

The lens was standard, wet Cambridge once more - the way it looks 75% of the year. Familiar, if uncomfortable and at at times mildly unpleasant.

In Market Square two gents were unconvincingly enacting a performance of Livingstone-style Africa-explorers, with bushy false moustaches, Victorian helmets, khakis and pipes, and a boom-box blasting jungle animal sounds -

Outside Trinity heading towards St Johns college, usual small crowds of tourists were gathered under umbrellas -

I stopped to take a picture of Henry VIII looming above the entrance to Trinity which he founded -

and next to it, Newton's apple tree - beloved by tourists despite the fact that it is not the original tree but a descendant grafted from a cutting of the original at his home in Lincolnshire which is where he was when he had his famous gravitational inspiration, because Cambridge had been temporarily shut down as a result of the plague. (An event eerily repeated 400 years later in our own plague of 2020-21 that shut down schools and campuses around the world).

The above is a cropped picture, taken at the exact spot where I regularly see tourists who have taken the trouble to buy fresh apples in order to pose with them à la Newton for selfies in front of the tree. Madness of our time.

Step back a bit and you see a bunch of discarded rotting apples that have been tossed onto the grass post-selfies, their job done, as well as the rope and signs preventing people from getting closer to the tree for their photos.

But what I was interested in was the new creation and planting of these square beds in front of Newton's tree that was done this summer. To honour the 400th anniversary of a contemporary of Newton at Trinity in the 1600s - the botanist John Ray. They're a recreation, from engravings, of beds that Ray planted in this spot long before Newton's tree-descendant arrived.

Ray came to Cambridge aged 16 from humble origins (son of a blacksmith) to study 'rhetoric, logic and grammar' (as one did) but became 'rather unwell' and ended up 'taking a break from these demanding studies by walking' in the Cambridgeshire countryside, where he began systematically documenting local plants, ending up becoming the acknowledged father of natural history (he coined the terms petal and pollen). I do love how these kind of segues were once possible.

Ray revolutionised botany just by walking around the countryside looking, describing and documenting what he saw. A hundred or so years later Linnaeus used Ray's foundational framework to create his taxonomy of all living things.

I walked home thinking how my mother - whose 100th birthday is tomorrow (if she were still alive) - would have loved to see this. She loved to explain how Linnaeus's famous protegé Carl Peter Thunberg travelled to the Cape in the 1700s and spent years there learning Dutch and collecting and naming specimens in this region with the highest concentration of plant species and unique types on earth -