Gardens of the sea show their secrets

FOR most people, seaweed conjures up thoughts of stringy, slimy strands of gunk that get caught in your toes at the beach.

But some Victorians delighted in cataloguing the stuff and keeping it preserved in books, as Tunbridge Wells Museum curator Dr Ian Beavis knows very well.

Prompted by a poem he saw on social networking site Twitter, the museum curator revealed that a collection of pages and pages of pressing books is housed in Civic Way.

He said: "The Victorians used to float seaweed on pieces of paper in a shallow bowl of water. It would enable them to arrange them artistically, using a small brush to help.

"This really started getting popular in the 1830s, particularly with ladies. It was all part of the whole natural history craze that was so popular among the Victorians."

He said natural history hobbies began in the Georgian era and were very much an activity confined to the noble elite.

But the rising prosperity of the middle classes, coupled with their enjoying more leisure time and using the railways to get to the seaside, saw the hobby reach a broader base, said Dr Beavis.

Going to the coast became a health craze to rival trips to spa resorts such as Tunbridge Wells.

Dr Beavis added: "Seashore life was hugely popular – collecting in rock pools, taking things back such as crabs and prawns and the seaweed and setting up marine aquaria in your home. I think it was a whole new world people had not previously been too aware of.

"The ocean had always been a great mystery and there was now an incredible fascination."

He contacted marine and coastal expert Maya Plass, from Devon, after she posted a tweet on the social network site flagging up a poem about her favourite red seaweed, To The Oak Leaved Delesseria.

Dr Beavis used Twitter to show her fascinating pictures of the museum's own pressed specimens.

The poem, printed in an 1846 book called Ocean Flowers And Their Teachings, is about the seaweed's beauty – a beauty never seen by man.

Dr Beavis said: "It was this idea that there is beauty out there in the world and nobody sees it. This was pre-Darwin.

"This is when people believed that everything was created for a purpose so people tended to say that everything was created for the benefit of human beings.

"This poem challenges that. It is saying this is not the case, creation has its own integrity – it's not all about us."

The seaweed books can be seen at Tunbridge Wells Museum as part of the exhibition on the Tunbridge Wells Natural History and Philosophical Society, which founded the museum in 1885.