Day 14 – Monday

Given the impact of the Martian’s Red Weed on England’s urban and country environments we take a short detour to consider the plants that for a short time drowned much of England in a sea of red.

In London,  the entries in Toni’s diary offers essential reading for the modern historian to properly understand the sweeping political changes that occurred after 1897. Many historians speculate that without ‘The Line’ and the anger it caused, the changes to society that swept from London, and indeed into the wider world, would have taken many more decades.

The Curies continue to collect evidence that the Martians are highly susceptible to arsenic.

Lt Dullanty decides to move his two platoons closer to London, setting up a heligraph in Greenwich to maintain contact with Tilbury Fort, while Lt Carver (ex HMS Thunder Child) continues to march his ragtag group towards Woking.

Things may be getting a bit crowded in London 😉

It is Wells’ and the curate’s 6th day confined to the collapsed house in Sheen, and they are amongst the first to notice the red weed. Biologists remain divided as to whether the Martians intentionally or accidentally brought the seeds with them. #RedWeed

There is no doubt to its hypertrophy, however, Wells recording that the red weed “grew with astonishing vigour and luxuriance, spreading up the sides of the pit so that its cactus-like branches quickly formed a carmine fringe to the edges of their triangular window.”

The botanist Ernest Marquand, author of “Flora of Guernsey” and “The Red Weed” was fascinated by the Martian vegetation. Forced to remain in London during the invasion due to the pregnancy of his wife, he seized the opportunity to observe and document the plants as they appeared.

Marquand was the first to note that the red creeper was actually a transitory growth, which failed to gain any footing in competition with terrestrial forms. In its initial stages however, it appeared throughout the country, especially wherever there was a source of water.

Marquand was also one of the first to note the appearance of what he described as “a brown sheet of flowing shallow water, where meadows used to be along the Thames”. #Marquand #TheRedWeed

While initially surprised at this flood in an otherwise hot, dry summer, Marquand postulated that the flooding was caused by the tropical exuberance of the red weed.
He writes: “Directly the Red Weed encounters water it straightway becomes gigantic and of unparalleled fecundity. Its seeds simply poured down into the water of the Wey and Thames, its swiftly growing and Titanic water-fronds speedily choking both these rivers.” #Marquand

Alfred R Wallace, the well know naturalist and biologist, and 74 at the time of the invasion, remained at “Old Orchard” his house in Dorset throughout the war, and observed the spread and later death of the Martian weeds through the kitchen window.

Wallace is the first to suggest that by the action of natural selection, terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting power against bacterial diseases — never succumbing without a severe struggle. The red weed had no defence, however.

In Wallace’s “Darwin and the Martian” (1899) he wrote: “The Red Weed grew like a thing already dead. The fronds bleach, shrivel and become brittle. Dead, they break off at the least touch, and the waters that stimulated their early growth carried their last vestiges out to sea.”