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BIOLOGY

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Return this book on or before the
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B.S.B.I. Conference Reports, Number Seven

Report of the 1961 Conference
arranged by the Society

LOCAL FLORAS

Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2018 with funding from
BHL-SIL-FEDLINK

https://archive.org/details/reportofconferen7196bota

CATAL OGUS

PLANTARUM

CIRCA

C ANtJBRIG IJ M

nafcentium :

In quo exhibentur

Qyotquot hadcnus invcntae funt, quse
vel fponte proveniunt, vel in
agrisferuntur ;

Una cam

Synonymis feledlioribus, locis natalibus

& obfervation’il)iis quibiifdam
oppido raris.

Adjiciuntur in gratiam tjronum^

Index Anglico-latinus, Index locorum ,
Etymologia nominum,& Explicatio
quorundam terminoriim.

Apud Jo, (J^artin, Ja, AUefiry^ Tho,
JPicaSf adiningneCampantc
in Cccmecerio D.

Pauli i55o.

LOCAL FLORAS

EDITED BY

P. J. WANSTALL

Published by

THE BOTANICAL SOCIETY OF THE BRITISH ISLES

London

1963

Sold by the Botanical Society of the British Isles, c/o Department of
Botany, British Museum (Natural History), Cromwell Road, London, S.W.7.

Printed by

T. Bungle & Co. Ltd.. Market Place, Arbroath.

aao 71

Z'OiC ^

CONTENTS

Title page of Ray’s Catalogus Plantarum circa Cantahrigiam

Page

Frontispiece
7

nascentium , 1680
Editorial Note ...

Introductory Remarks. The President

The Changing Pattern. J. S. L. Gtlmour .

Why and What. D.E. Allen...

Defining the Area. R. D. Meikle ...

Dividing the Area. F. H. Perring ...

Collecting the Data. J. G. Hawkes and R. C. Readett
Problems of Identification. C. C. Townsend

Old Records. D. McClintock .

A New Comital Flora? D. H. Kent .

Cutting the Costs. R. W. David .

Counting the Cost. J. G. Dony

Review of the Work of the Conference. The President
Closing Discussion

A Survey of County Floras. H. J. M. Bowen

County Floras Recently Published or in Preparatio
H. J. M. Bowen .

Exhibits which Illustrated some Past, Present and Future
Local Floras

Index

8

9

14

21

28

37

50

59

70

82

87

94

99

102

106

107

115

The Frontispiece

This plate was produced from a print very kindly supplied by
the Cambridge University Press. It illustrates the title page of
what J. L. Gilmour calls elsewhere in this Report (p. 10) ‘the first
full-scale local Flora’.

7

EDITORIAL NOTE

This is a report of the proceedings of the seventh Conference
held by the Society. On this occasion we had the privilege of
using the rooms of the Linnean Society for the whole meeting.
The reading of papers and subsequent discussions were held on
24th and 25th November, 1961, and the Exhibition in the Linnean
Society Library on 25th November. The full texts of the papers
are printed here with the major part of the discussions which
followed each contribution. Only in instances of irrelevancy has
any part of a discussion been omitted. I was helped considerably
at this Conference by Miss F. O. Elword who produced an excellent
transcript of the discussions, which were more extensive than at
any recent Conference.

The part of the Exhibition which was arranged to illustrate the
work carried out on some recent local Floras and on those to be
published in the future has been covered in summaries included
at the end of this report. The report of the other part of the
Exhibition has been published in Proceedings, Vol. 4, Pt. 4.

The whole meeting was a tribute to the stimulus provided by
the preparatory work for the Atlas, which was initiated at the
1950 Conference, for without this stimulus there might not have
been so many new Floras in preparation as there are to-day, or
such a wide interest in plant distribution. One is tempted to
wonder what the position will be at the end of the century : will
the public, and naturalists, be more conservation conscious or
will it be worthwhile producing Floras of Nature Reserves and
National Parks only, because what is left of other areas of ‘natural’
vegetation will be so poor in species (especially dicots.) as a result
of the excessive use of herbicides, that no one who is interested
in local areas will wish to publish the localities of the few remain¬
ing species. Perhaps the renewed interest in local Floras will go
a long way to encourage conservation before the picture painted
above becomes a reality.

I would like to express my thanks to those members of the
Publications Committee who have helped with the production of
this report in providing information and undertaking proof
reading, and especially to Mr. E. B. Bangerter, who helped with
the transcription of the discussions, and to Mr. D. H. Kent, who
as usual accepted a lion’s share of the proof reading. I would also
like to thank our printers who are so very patient with editors and
who seem to know what is required without the need for detailed
instructions.

P. J. Wanstall.

8

LOCAL FLORAS

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

The Conference was opened by the President, Mr. J. E.
Lousley, who said : —

It would hardly be possible to select a more appropriate and
opportune subject for our Conference than “Local Floras”. It is
appropriate because every member of the Society needs to consult
published local Floras, and every member, however inexperienced,
can make useful contributions to new ones in preparation. It is
opportune because no better time could have been chosen to
review the aims of these works and the methods by which they
are produced.

In a few months we will have in our hands the “Atlas” showing
the distribution of plants throughout the British Isles plotted on
the basis of the 10 km. squares of the National Grid. This
represents an outstanding achievement to which most of our mem¬
bers have contributed directly, but it was the availability of a
series of local Floras of varying ages covering almost the whole
country that made the present standard of the maps possible. It
is now time to consider the relationship between the detailed
records of local works and this new general study of distribution
based on the grid system.

At the present time there are many new local Floras in pre¬
paration. Some of these are the work of individuals, others are
being compiled jointly or by committees. Some are following
traditional lines, others are launching out with revolutionary new
methods and aims. The papers we are to hear to-day and to¬
morrow will provide ideas new to many of us and a valuable
opportunity of comparing different approaches to the problems
involved. It seems to me essential to remember at all times that
every area has its own needs, every worker has his own capa¬
bilities, and every district has its own level of financial support.
Britain has already produced a series of local Floras which are the
envy of botanists in other countries. This is the time to consider
how future works can be made even better.

It is now my very pleasant duty to welcome our guests and
our speakers. I feel sure that with such a happy choice of subject
our Conference is bound to be a great success.

THE CHANGING PATTERN

9

THE CHANGING PATTERN

J. S. L. Gilmour

In this opening talk of the Conference, I want to look at
British local Floras, not so much for their own sake, but as
‘mirrors’ reflecting the changing pattern of British field botany
over the past three hundred years. During this period field
botany, like any other scientific activity, has, of course, changed
out of all recognition. In the mid-seventeenth century we find a
handful of field botanists — many of them with a professional
interest in plants — travelling the country on horse-back, identify¬
ing the plants they collected with the aid of herbals and naming
them with the cumbersome multinomials of the pre-Linnean age.
Three hundred years later these pioneers have been replaced by a
mixed army of well organised amateurs and professionals, trans¬
ported by trains, motor cars, and even aeroplanes, equipped with
up-to-date manuals of identification, and many of them as
interested in the ecology and micro-evolution of the plants they
study as they are in their identification. To study this transfor¬
mation in detail would require a history of British — indeed world
— botany, but what I want to attempt to do is to take a small
selection of the local Floras written during the period and to
point out how these ‘microcosms’ reflect some of the changes
taking place in the larger world of British field botany as a whole.

But first, how do we define a British local Flora? I would
suggest the following: “Any formal floristic account of the wild
plants of an area less than the whole British Isles”. The adjective
“formal” is intended to exclude accounts of botanising journeys
(e.g. Thomas Johnson’s Iter and Descriptio) and mere incidental
mentions or short lists of plants ; “floristic” excludes purely
ecological accounts, and the word “any” allows the inclusion, not
only of books wholly devoted to a local Flora, but Floras forming
chapters or sections of larger works.

We must clearly start with the first local Flora. What is it?
On my definition there is no doubt, I think, that it is the tiny
Appendix on the flora of Hampstead Heath appearing in Thomas
Johnson’s Descriptio Itineris (1632). The Descriptio itself, and
the earlier Iter (1629), are excluded as accounts of journeys; both
are very rare, as is Ralph’s reprint of 1847. The Hampstead
Appendix reflects very clearly the state of field botany at this
time. It is a bare list of multinomials, giving a few synonyms,
with no information on habitat, time of flowering, or distribution
— but it was the first local Flora and, as such, is to be honoured
and revered !

10

LOCAL FLORAS

Although Johnson’s Hampstead must be given pride of place,
the first full-scale local Flora was, of course, Ray’s Cambridge
Catalogus (1660). Canon Raven, in his Life of Ray, has stressed
the great importance of this work in the history of British field
botany as a whole, and I will pick out only one or two features of
importance for my purpose. The book still consists essentially of
a bare list of plants, arranged alphabetically, giving their localities
in the neighbourhood of Cambridge; but Ray included many
synonyms from earlier writers for his multinomials, and this
reflected a growing interest in trying to clear up the nomenclatural
chaos that was such a bar to progress in taxonomy at that time.

Ray died in 1704. Great as was his contribution to British
botany, he did not succeed in stimulating any large advance
during the first half of the eighteenth century. Perhaps the intel¬
lectual climate of the times was against this; the culture was
largely a classical culture and lacked the enthusiasm for Nature
which was to come later, hand-in-hand with the Romantic
Revival, and which was to prove such a great stimulus to field
botany. Nevertheless, several local Floras did appear during the
period, and I will choose Deering’s Catalogue of Plants . . . .
Nottingham (1738) as a typical example. It does not show any
great advance on Ray’s book as regards scope and treatment, and
is, of course, botanically much inferior. The arrangement is still
alphabetical (although Petiver had used Ray’s System in his
“Botanicum Londinense” in 1709) — but there is a point of interest
in the Preface which, perhaps, foreshadows the great popularity of
field botany that was to come. Deering recommends botanising
to country gentlemen as a counter-attraction to excessive drinking
and reading. ‘‘Can there be”, he says, “a more agreeable inter¬
position between the bottle and the book than the examination
of the Vegetable World?”.

As the eighteenth century drew to a close, several influences
began to stimulate a wider interest in field botany, and I have
chosen four local Floras to illustrate this change. The first is
Thomas Martyn’s Plantae Cantahrigienses (1763), which was the
earliest local Flora to use the Linnean system of classification and
nomenclature. I.innaeus’s binomials, replacing the protracted
multinomials of his predecessors, were undoubtedly a potent
factor in popularising field botany and soon became universally
adopted. My next Flora, Jacob’s Plantae Favershamienses
(1777), was, in fact, the last local Flora to use pre-Linnean names,
and also, incidentally, an alphabetical arrangement; but the fact
that the author excused this conservatism because he thought it
would appeal to non-scientific readers shows that a wider public
for botanising was already appearing. Two further points about
Jacob’s volume are worth mentioning; despite its Latin title, it
is written in English, and there is an appendix on the “fossil
bodies” of the Isle of Sheppey, which may be regarded as a fore¬
runner of the sections on geology, topography, etc., that were a
feature of later Floras.

THE CHANGING PATTERN

11

My third late eighteenth century Flora, Milne and Gordon’s
Indigenous Botany (1793), is not really a Flora on my definition
— it is an account of botanical journeys in Kent and Middlesex —
but I have included it because of its important Preface, in which
the authors attack professional botanists for “being unwilling to
exchange the ease of the closet for the labour of investigation ....
on mountains and precipices, in deep valleys and lonely heaths, in
ditches and canals, encountering the heat of the burning sun in
the open champagne”. Here speaks the authentic voice of the
Romanticism that was to come !

In Abbot’s Flora Bedfordiensis (1798) this voice is even more
clearly heard. Charles Abbot was a Society clergyman and he
dedicated his volume to Queen Charlotte, “the First Female
Botanist in the wide circle of the British Dominions”. In his
Preface he says that his Flora is expressly for the use of “the Fair
Daughters of Albion”, and it is written entirely in English (in¬
cluding the names of the Linnean classes!). There are coloured
illustrations, and the whole work is far removed from the bare lists
of Latin names which formed the local Floras of a hundred years
earlier.

The stage is now set for the sensationally rapid expansion of
field botany that characterised the nineteenth century. To what
was this expansion due? A full-scale essay could, of course, be
devoted to this question, and I can mention only two or three of
the main factors responsible. Some are obvious : the spread of
popular education; the opening up of the Continent after the
Napoleonic wars, which allowed contact with foreign botanists;
the development of railways; the publication of better British
Floras for identification; and the founding of a multitude of
national and local natural history societies. One factor, however,
is rather less obvious, but nevertheless had a powerful influence,
namely the change in the general cultural climate from the
classicism of the eighteenth century to the Romantic Revival of
the early and mid-nineteenth century — a revival that contained
a strong element of “back to Nature” in its make-up.

The most obvious effect of these changes in local Floras was,
of course, in the numbers published. Up to about 1770 the average
was between 1 and 2 every decade; a rapid increase then set in,
and the numbers rose to 33 in the ten years between 1850 and
1860. From this point there was a steady fall, due not, of course,
to a decline in field botany, but to the fact that most counties, by
that time, already had local Floras. So much for quantitative
effects; local Floras also reflected qualitative changes accompany¬
ing the expansion of field botany, and I will pick out a selection
published during the nineteenth century to illustrate these
changes.

Kingston and Jones’s Flora Devoniensis (1829) is important
as the first local Flora to use the Natural System of classification,
though the authors paid tribute to a dying system by including

12

LOCAL FLORAS

an alternative Linnean arrangement as well! The first local
Flora to use the Natural System only was Lindley's Flora
Bathoniensis (1834) — and the last to use the Linnean System
was, I think, St. Brody’s Flora of W eston-super-Mare (1856). The
Flora Devoniensis was also notable for including, for the first time,
a wide range of non-botanical supplementary sections on topo¬
graphy, geology, climate, etc.

Another symptom of popularization was the complete replace¬
ment of Latin by English, a process, as I have already noted,
that had begun in the eighteenth century. The last local Flora
to be vTitten in Latin was the third edition of Relhan’s Flora
Cantabrigiensis (1820), though Latin titles lingered on for some
time; the last was, I believe. Flora Cravonensis (1873).

Many of the early local Floras included descriptions of the
plants, but with the increasing availability of identification
manuals covering the whole of Britain, these descriptions became
unnecessary^ The British Floras by W. J. Hooker and Babington
first appeared in 1830 and 1842 respectively — and the last descrip¬
tive local Flora was Bromfield’s Flora Vectensis (1856).

Although the Romantic Revival provided an atmosphere that
stimulated field botany, some of its manifestations were carried
to excess and led to a ridiculous sentimentality. The most acute
examples of this are in the writings of Edwin Lees (e.g. in The
Botanical Looker-out (1842), but Webb and Coleman’s Flora
Hertfordiensis (1849), where every family is preceded by a short
poem, is perhaps tarred with the same brush).

During the first half of the nineteenth century local Floras
gradually improved in their scientific value, fulness of treatment,
and, largely due to the work of H. C. Watson, in the accuracy of
their distribution data. The culminating point of this steady
progress came in 1869, when Trimen and Dyer published their
Flora of Middlesex. This volume gathered together preceding
improvements and set the standard for all future local Floras.
There was a full and scholarly history of previous investigations,
with a bibliography; detailed distribution was given by districts;
pre-Linnean synonyms were listed, and first records for the county
were quoted. During the next 50 years many fine county Floras
appeared, modelled on Trimen and Dyer, of which the following
might be specially picked out: Briggs’s “Plymouth” (1880),
Townsend’s “Hampshire” (1882), Druce’s “Thames Valley Series”,
Hanbury and Marshall’s “Kent” (1899), and, perhaps the finest of
all. White’s “Bristol” (1909).

During the present century many excellent new county Floras
have replaced old ones that are out of date, and these have
reflected the growing interest, during the period, in the taxonomy
and distribution of critical genera, and in ecology. Britain has
now, without doubt, one of the finest series of local Floras of
anv countrv in the world.

THE CHANGING TATTEKN

13

To finish this brief survey, I will say a word about the authors
of the local Floras whose history I have sketched. In 1929 1
carried out an analysis of the professions of these authors, during
the previous 300 years, with some rather intriguing results. Of
131 authors (only 3 of them women), 102 were amateurs and 29
professionals, and, of the amateurs, 56, or nearly 45% of the total
authors, w^ere, as might be expected, doctors (32) or clergymen
(24) — both callings affording leisure for cultured pursuits in a
rural setting! The better represented occupations among the
remaining amateurs included druggist or apothecary (10), country
gentleman (6), bookseller (5), business man (3), schoolmaster,
nurseryman, and clerk (2 each). No other occupation had more
than a single representative; they included a policeman, an
astronomer, a china manufacturer, and a manager of an arsenic
mine. Field botany is certainly not narrow in its appeal!

14

LOCAL FLORAS

WHY AND WHAT?

D. E. Allen

‘\V4iy write a local Flora?’ is a question that needs no answer.
But ‘Why publish a local Flora?’ is one that is posed too seldom,
and one that deserves more careful thought than it is usually
given. Why not merely store your records in a card-index, for
instance, or a record-book and ultimately deposit this in an
appropriate institution? Or is there something rather special
about a local Flora, something in and of the genre itself maybe,
that calls for its permanent enshrinement in print?

If local Floras were no more than compilations of records, then
clearly the filing of a manuscript at a museum or library or field
centre would be sufficient for the purpose — always provided, of
course, that its existence is made widely known and that any
records of particular interest are also communicated to county or
national publications. But a local Flora is usually more than just
a collection of records. It is a guide for others to the plants of a
neighbourhood which they need to be able to take into the field.
Local Floras that are printed and circulated are also picked up in
bibliographies, noticed by chance in bookshops, reviewed or at
least referred to in newspapers and journals, bought by public
libraries .... In short, they draw the attention of botanists to
that neighbourhood and the attention of the neighbourhood to its
botany; they provide a valuable base-line to stimulate further
effort; and not infrequently, and perhaps most fruitfully of all,
they make converts to the subject itself.

There are other, less practical, inducements besides. The very
word ‘publication’ has a certain magical ring about it. Only the
best novelists succeed in having their waitings published ; to ‘get
into print’ has thus become a hallmark of distinction, something
worth aiming at for its own sake, a contribution which, however
small and insignificant, is normally assured (unlike a manuscript)
of passing down to posterity. Authors of local Floras, in fact,
suffer from all the vanities and delusions of all authors everywhere
— with one important exception : unless they are impossibly
sanguine, they do not expect their efforts to bring them money.

Granted, then, that publication is a desirable end in itself,
what form should the work take? The answer to this, I want to
suggest, should spring from three different considerations.

First and most obviously, one must take into account whom
the Flora is primarily aimed at. Is it intended mainly for the
scientifically-minded? Or for the non-advanced and beginners?

WHY AND WHAT

15

Or for tourists? Or for schools? Too many Moras seem to have
been written with the aim of satisfying all groups at once. But is
this possible — and, even if it is possible, is it desirable? We shall
hear later on in this Conference about the economics of publish¬
ing Floras, and I suspect that we shall be told that few Floras ever
receive adequate publicity and even fewer sell as many copies as
they deserve. Most authors can leave these matters to their
publishers ; the author of a local Flora ordinarily can not. Unless
he is completely unconcerned about the loss to his pocket — or his
backers’ pocket — he needs to give careful thought to the sort of
people who are most likely to buy, and even more importantly
use, his book. He needs to carry out (if I may be forgiven so
commercial an expression) some market research. Frankly, he
should ask himself, is the Flora going to be good enough to pass
into the top rank, full of enough detail or novelty and sufficiently
embracing in its scope to interest advanced workers while also
appealing, by photographs maybe or fullish lists of localities, to
those who would be scared off by anything too narrowly
scientific? If the answer is ‘y®®’? well and good; if ‘no’, then
would it not be better to cast the work in a deliberately more
popular mould, jettisoning some of the more technical aspects and
livening up the language — without, of course, descending to any¬
thing merely catchpenny? Few of us, alas, are J. W. Whites; we
cannot hope to write another Bristol Flora and please all of the
people all of the time. A Flora of a county in particular, once
published, effectively spoils the market for any, better work for
many years. Too many counties in the past have been lumbered
for too long with third-rate works which unworthily bestowed on
themselves the official title of County Flora, thereby bemusing
not only the innocent, who are always liable to be overimpressed
by mere names, but also those blithe cataloguers who would
rather a list of county Floras looked as long and exhaustive as
possible than was thinned out to form a sensible guide by apply¬
ing certain standards of discrimination.

The second consideration in writing a Flora that I want to
suggest rather follows on from the first. If it is better not to aim
higher than one’s abilities, it is better, equally, not to bite off more
than one can reasonably expect to chew. The last thing one
wants to happen is to be tyrannised by one’s Flora. A famous
clerical botanist of an earlier generation undertook a county Flora
of such prodigious dimensions that it eventually took over his
whole life, dominating him to such an extent that he became the
first vicar, so far as is known, whose church has collapsed while
the incumbent was out botanising. The Flora of the Isle of Man,
which I am currently engaged on myself, is a holiday Flora. I am
happy to spend my two or three weeks every summer or so
exploring the interesting parts of the island; but I am not pre¬
pared, in the interest of some ideal grid-recording system, to spend
these all-too-brief holidays squelching through trackless blanket-
bog and combing moors which I have amply satisfied myself are

1(3

LOCAL FLORAS

all but barren. We are not machines : we are only human. And
we might as well face up to the fact before we start that perfection
is, in any case, unattainable. Why, then, torture ourselves un¬
duly? Field botany is not, after all, a matter of life and death.

Generally speaking, the size of the area that has to be worked
automatically decides the degree of thoroughness with which this
can be done. Clearly, recording methods that might be appro¬
priate for a Flora of Rutland would hardly be appropriate for a
Flora of Inverness. Those whose primary interest is in micro¬
distribution or who like working areas with the greatest possible
thoroughness should avoid anywhere very big.

This matter of size, however, becomes more complicated when
the human factors are taken into account. A large area in the
south of England will be easier to work, thanks to many more
helpers and better communications, than a smaller one in, say, the
Highlands or Ireland. On the other hand, the Flora of an area
that is comparatively remote will doubtless involve much less
chasing-up of old records, while at the same time fewer co-workers
will mean less time devoted to checking doubtful records and to
correspondence.

Floras that are entirely the work of one person I can see no
harm in. At the least this ought to give the resulting work a
strongly individual flavour. But most Floras are, inevitably, co¬
operative efforts, wdiether the project starts as that of a team at
the outset or gradually builds up into one as the compiler enlists
the aid of more and more people. The stimulus which the compil¬
ing of a Flora can give to a local society is, of course, one of the
best justifications for undertaking one. But co-operative work
of this kind calls for considerable patience and considerable skill.
How far it is taken, and how much fruit it can be made to bear,
depend enormously on the personality of the individual compiler.
Some compilers do little more than tolerate the rest of their team ;
they announce that they are always glad to receive records and do
little more. At the opposite extreme are those highly-organised
projects — one might almost call them campaigns — in which every
single person who is botanically capable is contacted, formally
enrolled, schooled in the official recording methods, allotted his
area for recording, and finally nagged and cajoled into fulfilling
his quota.

INIy personal sympathies lie rather with this, the dirigiste,
than with the laisser-faire approach, but in its extreme form it
clearly has the drawback that the organizing can take up almost
as much time as the field-work itself. We can, I fear, only hope
for these highly-disciplined operations in parts of the country
where competent botanists are fairly thick on the ground and in
frequent personal contact. Much more usually, the compiler of a
flora is forced to compromise. There will be many potential
helpers, but they will be extremely scattered, some resident in the
area, some frequent visitors, some accidental casuals. Some can
be met in person, others will be mere names at the bottom of

WHY AND WHAT

17

letters. Some will be excellent and wholly reliable, some erratic,
most at the best uncertain. Each will have special quirks and
failings : there will be Mr. X, who avoids ‘the yellow flowers’. Miss
Y, who only sees large plants, and Mrs. Z, who only paints. Some
will never climb mountains, some will ignore trees or grasses,
some will refuse to collect voucher specimens. All must be
humoured, understood, allowed for, fitted into the recording
system as best one can, because all without exception may be
able to help, some in one way, others in another. The beginner,
we must never forget, always has enormous, unfair, quite
incredible luck. In his ignorance he goes to parts where everyone
knows nothing of interest could possibly occur. A high proportion
of all the most exciting discoveries are made in the wrong places,
by the wrong people, and by mistake.

A good compiler will know the blind spots of each and every
one of his contributors. At times he will have to be severe, even
ruthless : spared feelings make bad botany. And this, I have
always thought, is the best argument for including biographical
notes in local Floras. To be of greatest use, these should, ideally,
enable the reader to assess the botanical standing of every major
contributor, and to this end they need therefore to be as sharply-
chiselled as politeness will allow.

The encouragement of helpers is also, of course, one of the best
arguments for reproducing lists of localities and finders’ names.
The inclusion of these is, perhaps, currently the most controversial
feature of local Floras. Some, I know, would like to eliminate
them altogether : they are expensive to print, horrible to proof¬
read, and as indicators of distribution patterns only meaningful
to readers with a first-class knowledge of local geography — for
even if a map be included or grid-references to all place-names,
only readers with a special purpose will have the energy to plot
them and thus put them to proper use. If a local Flora is to be
anything more than a printed catalogue or a book of clues for
treasure-hunts, it thus seems imperative that the author should
provide for each species a brief summing-up of the distribution
as implied by its known localities. This is assuming that the
decision has been made to include localities at all : I appreciate
that some would like to abandon them, more or less entirely, for
maps.

At the same time, while being mindful of one’s contributors,
it is a mistake to be too optimistic about the help that will be
forthcoming from them. Other people will not be all-familiar
with the geography of the area (as the compiler should be), with
the past records, with the relative frequency of the different
species. Nor will they necessarily have the same keenness to
make lists or to work dull areas as thoroughly as they should.
Contributors, alas, are not labour units, but ordinary men and
women (and maybe even children) — and, what is more, busy and
often temperamental people whose work is entirely voluntary and
may never even materialise if they are not approached in the

18

LOCAL FLORAS

right manner and given regular and appropriate encouragement.
Most Floras, in short, are more than just a matter of field-work and
scholarship ; they are subtle achievements in human relationships.
Compilers are like conductors : if they have no skill in getting
people to play together, they had better abandon the attempt, for
they will only produce wTong notes.

The third and final consideration in writing a local Flora that
I want to suggest is, while less basic than the other two, all the
same necessary if a work is to stand out from the common run.
A good Flora, I suggest, needs a personality, a character all its
own, some originality in approach which will lend it distinction
— if we must have the word, a ‘gimmick’. Ideally this wall arise
naturally out of the individual character of the area itself, or of
its special suitability for displaying some new approach or tech¬
nique. Professor Good found in the smallish but physically
diverse county of Dorset an excellent subject for the highly
detailed study of distribution in relation to soil type and rainfall.
Dr. Dony gave extra depth to his Flora of Bedfordshire by making
a special feature of habitat studies. “A Contribution to the Flora
of Merioneth”, now just appearing, pays laudibly close attention to
hybrids. A Flora of a mountainous count v wall naturallv lay
emphasis on the altitudinal range of different species ; a Flora of a
small island on the evidence provided by botany for the date of
its severance from the mainland, or on the ecological effects of the
absence of certain species, or on the variation resulting from
isolation. Alternatively, a Flora may acquire a special character
arising out of a special interest of the author’s, unrelated to the
area in question. Scott Elliot’s Flora of Dumfriesshire^ in most
respects a disappointing work, is at least memorable for the
attention it gives to the insects noted as visitors to various plants.

For contrast, look at some of the ‘grey’ Floras — that of Surrej^
for instance, or of Leicestershire and Rutland. These are com¬
petent and thorough; they include everything it has become the
convention to include; they are valuable additions to knowledge.
And yet they are dismally flat, almost boring to read. No one
would think their authors actually enjoyed compiling them. They
are little more than card-indexes grown up — and exhibit all the
shapelessness of their birth.

The trouble with these and all too many like them is that the
standard model for the local Flora, welcome and fresh when first
established by Trimen and Dyer, has been allowed to grow stale
and banal. A type has become a stereotype. Features which
were appropriate for a local flora fifty or even twentj" 3*ears ago
are no longer appropriate to-day. First Records, for instance,
except in the case of alien immigrants, have surely become a
meaningless ritual? And must we have those same repetitive
titbits of folklore? Let us have either no folklore at all or else an
avowedh" folklore-angled Flora. Let us have colourful Floras at all
costs, even if it means breaking up a familiar pattern we have
grown used to and fond of.

WHY WHAT

19

There is nothing, apart from the records tliemselves, which
must go into a local Flora. Let each author only include what he
honestly feels can be properly covered. Climate, geology, soils,
land-use data, the post-glacial history of the vegetation, crypto-
gamic groups — yes, include these by all means, if you have enough
information and, best of all, can write them up yourself. If the
author genuinely cannot cope with some or all of these secondary
subjects — and some authors never even try — then careful thought
should be given to the problems of farming them out. There are
always drawbacks to a Flora contributed to by several hands :
unevennesses of treatment, irrelevancies by the non-botanical,
gross disparities of style. I repeat: better character than com¬
pleteness — which, in any case, is an elusive ideal.

Finally, and above all, let us be clear what it is we are basically
trying to write. Must a local Flora necessarily be viewed primarily
as a contribution to biological science? Would it not sometimes
be better viewed more as a contribution to geography? Perhaps
we tend to overestimate its importance in one direction, while
perhaps at the same time we tend to underrate it in another.

Discussion

Dr. Bowen raised the question as to how frequently county Floras
should be published. Until recently every 50 years had been sufficient,
but even this was a shorter period than was usual. He considered that
the tremendous amount of new interest in natural history to which the
Director General of the Nature Conservancy had recently referred could
revolutionise the Society in the next 40 years, even increasing the mem¬
bership by a factor of ten. This would make a difference to the frequency
of publication of new Floras.

Dr. Perking wished to challenge Mr. Allen’s statement about Floras
written by more than one person. Perhaps Mr. Gilmour would comment;
had he any statistics about the success of Floras written in this way?

Mr. Gilmour said he had no statistics on this point. Certainly there
had been some very good Floras written by more than one person. Mr.
Allen added that we did not know whether in fact such Floras had been
written by more than one person. Did one or two people write Hanbury
and Marshall’s Flora?

Mr. Bangerter said it was of some interest to consider the personality
of the author. He particularly remembered Col. Wolley-Dod when he
was writing the Flora of Sussex. It was customary for him to go to the
Natural History Museum and take copious notes from the herbarium and
library. When he arrived home he would find that he often could not
read his own notes and would send a postcard to the Museum to ask for
them to be checked. This may explain how some mistakes got into this
particular Flora.

Mrs. Russell wondered why only three Floras had been written by
women — was it their sensitiveness, or did they reflect on the beauty of
white paper before they wrote?

20

LOCAL FLORAS

Mr. Meikle thought women had been otherwise engaged for when one
examined the more difficult groups of plants, e.g. lichens and marine algae,
one found that women workers outnumbered men, so perhaps women are
cleverer than men.

Mr. David asked why there were not more supplements produced for
Floras? Where there was a good basic one would this not be a good way
of bringing it up-to-date? Dr. Bowen thought that this was a way in
which the Society could help by publishing more supplements in
Proceedings.

Professor Hawkes disagreed with Mr. Allen about dull ground being
unproductive. From his experience if they had not gritted their teeth
and gone through dull areas they would not have found many of the
interesting records.

Mr. Readett claimed that it was the first time it had been seriously
suggested that there is a place for humour in a local Flora. He found
the suggestion of supplements for floras very interesting and thought this
point should be considered when the flora was being planned.

Mr. Bangerter asked whether the regular production of supplements,
by virtually making a new Flora unnecessary, would not tend to destroy
the production of a flora with individuality? Mr. Allen agreed, for there
was a risk then that a Flora would perish from ‘appendicitis’.

Mr. Murray thought there would always be a lot of bright young men
who would want to go on writing their individualistic Floras.

Mr. Kent considered that the real author of the Flora o/ Middlesex
to be the Rev. W. W. Newbould. Trimen and Dyer did a certain amount of
field work but Newbould did most of the literary research. Hind and
James Britten also assisted with its production.

Mr. Lousley came to the conclusion that young people should be
encouraged to work on local Floras, but they should also be encouraged to
get advice from more experienced workers.

DEFINING THE AREA

21

DEFINING THE AREA

R. D. Meikle

I am sure you have all, at one time or another, suffered or
possibly enjoyed contemporary drama, the significant sort of play
where long and pregnant silences are briefly interrupted by
obscure and disconnected utterances. Well, when I came to con¬
sider what I could say about “Defining the Area” I was driven to
the conclusion that the techniques of the avant-garde theatre
offered me the only hope of escape from a very embarrassing
situation.

How does one talk for thirty minutes about something so
nebulous, so abstract and so amorphous? To define means, I
presume, to demonstrate the limits, or to throw a boundary
around something. And as this is a botanical conference on local
Floras, and not a seance or a space-travel symposium, the “area” is
presumably intended to refer to the amount of ground that can be
conveniently and appropriately enclosed within the boundaries of
a local Flora. What area, in other words, should be chosen by
those who intend to compile a local Flora? The answ^er is, of
course, any area, for if we view the vegetation of this planet as a
whole, then the “Flora Europaea” becomes a local Flora — if our
minds are dominated by the botany of Europe, then “Clapham,
Tutin and Warburg” becomes a local Flora — and if we are intrepid
enough to devote our time to writing a British Flora, then the
Flora of Devon, or Gloucester or Sussex becomes a local Flora.
One could write a Flora of a back-garden — and I’m sure it has been
done — and parish Floras are by no means uncommon. There is a
Flora BeVastiensis, a Flora of Harrow, a Bristol Flora and
many similar works dealing wath areas larger than a parish, but
considerably smaller than a county. Sometimes the area is
defined as being within so many miles radius of a convenient
centre; sometimes the authors are so vague that when they call
their book the Flora of Somewhere-or-other we can only conclude
that the area intended is an unstated sphere of influence — just
as one might, for instance, compile a very useful Commuters
Flora of London which would include large and undefined
portions of Kent, Surrey, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertford¬
shire and Essex, with special reference to the vegetation of railway
banks. In defining an area it is not necessary to put lines on a
map, or to attach visible or calculable limits to the space we intend
to survey. In fact — and I will return to this later — I sometimes
think that the compilers of Floras are so obsessed with divisions
and boundaries that they lose sight of the proper purposes of their

99

LOCAL FLORAS

work. But I suppose, as human beings, leading a finite existence,
and encompassed everywhere by frontiers of one sort or another,
we tend naturally to attach an exaggerated importance to lines of
demarcation. And I suppose it is for similar subconscious reasons
that most writers of local Floras have chosen the ancient, historical
and traditional area denominated “County” as the most usual
area for their researches. The “County” has a definite emotional
appeal — we are attached by bonds of loyalty to our county —
some of us even like to identify ourselves with it, and are flattered
with the title “county” or “one of the county”. I cannot imagine
anyone becoming emotionally attached to a grid square — unless
the “squares” we hear so much about at present are simply the
up-to-date counterparts of those who used to be known as “the
county”. For most purposes the county is still the area which
the majority of writers of local floras favour. Its boundaries are
for the most part fairly well charted, it has historical associations,
and local patriotism, if nothing else, will generally ensure a certain
quota of sales in return for the expense and sweat of Flora com¬
pilation.

But the county is not always the perfect area, some counties,
such as Yorksliire, are so absurdly large that they have to be
subdivided, and some such as Rutland or Huntingdon are so
absurdly small that they are invariably swallowed by a more
normal-sized neighbour. A few counties, such as Flintshire, have
odd bits and pieces scattered about adjacent counties, and many
counties shoot out long promontories and peninsulas making
awkward enclaves in the territory of their neighbours. Worse
than this, county boundaries are nothing like so immutable as is
often supposed; for various administrative reasons bits are con¬
tinually being subtracted or added, and it is quite possible, for
instance, that the Flora of Wiltshire, published as recently as 1957,
may in a few years’ time relate to an area no longer identical with
the county of Wiltshire, if, as is proposed, this county is enlarged
at the expense of Somerset. There is also the problem of county
boroughs such as Bristol and London, which have no existence in
botanical literature, and which may well be appropriated by rival
workers on several distinct county floras.

Some may suggest that we should, in the circumstances, accept
as final the county and vice-county boundaries outlined in
Watson’s Cyhele Britannica and Topographical Botany, or in
Praeger’s Irish Topographical Botany and ignore those changes
which are constantly being made to the area and limits of our
political counties. The Watsonian and Praegerian counties and
vice-counties have definite historical and emotional associations
for botanists, and they have names and numbers. But there are
difficulties, which I am sure Mr. Dandy will explain in some detail.
The boundary lines are, I believe, not always as clear as they
might be, and the 1 degree longitude line which divides Norfolk
and Suffolk has always presented difficulties in the field, as Watson
himself surmised. Moreover I find it hard to believe that the

DEFINING THE AREA

23

authors of county Floras will be prepared to accept the counties
as outlined in Cybele Britannica and Topographical Botany
especially where recent administrative changes have added to
their territory, and more particularly where these additions are
of particular botanical interest.

Should we then depart from the county tradition altogether,
and accept in its place the anonymous uniformity of the Grid
square? For some purposes, as for instance with the Maps
Scheme, the Grid square works admirably, and it has the
additional merit of dividing the whole country into equal parts, so
that one is not obliged to subdivide unmanageably large areas,
nor to merge small areas with larger neighbours. But the Grid
square has no historical or emotional associations. Its boundaries
seldom, if ever, follow any natural physical features. It has no
name. And one cannot imagine that the Flora of Grid Square x
or Grid Squares x, y and z would ever be best-sellers.

Since then there are objections to making the areas of our Floras
co-terminous with the administrative County, the Watsonian
county and vice-county and the Grid square, is there any alterna¬
tive definition which is likely to be more satisfactory? Quite
frankly I doubt if British botanists will be prepared to depart
from the time-honoured county Flora, though I think there is an
alternative. I seem to remember that a former President — I think
of the Dublin Naturalist’s Field Club, though I may be wrong —
made great sport of those enthusiasts who devote their energies
to making new county and vice-county records. He spoke of the
gentleman who was seen poking a crab with a stick in the hope
that it would move across a small inlet and allow him honestly to
record it from two adjacent counties. I have been told that
students of the genus Potamogeton are sometimes similarly
employed, and it has been reported that certain eminent botanists
show a marked partiality for county and vice-county boundaries
when they take an airing, and are to be met with, large scale
ordnance map in hand, gazing alternately from side to side, like
spectators at the Centre Court, hoping to kill two records with one
sweeping glance. I’m not saying that these stories are true, but
I do believe the county and vice-county system has over¬
emphasized the importance of “new records”, and has encouraged
the sort of one-upmanship which is detrimental to the interests of
systematic botany. Over a century ago Edwin Lees wrote a book
on the botany of the Malvern Hills, and I have sometimes thought
that we might more often depart from the county and choose
instead certain natural physical features of this country for de¬
tailed floristic examination. Although several works of this sort
have in fact been published, it is surprising, if one goes through
the pages of N. D. Simpson’s Bibliographical Index how very few
areas have been written up floristically in this way. True enough
there are numerous references to the “Plants of Whiteacre” or
“The rare plants of Blackacre” or “ A visit to Greenacre”, but
this is not quite what I mean, for by a Flora I intend not merely a

24

LOCAL FLORAS

selective list of exceptionally interesting plants, but a compre¬
hensive survey outlining the distribution, habitat and relative
abundance of each species, subspecies or variety. Some will say
that such a compilation falls within the province of ecology, to
this I would reply that every systematist should be something of
an ecologist, and that every worth-while Flora should combine
ecological, phytogeographical and taxonomic information. The
reason why so many Floras do not do so is largely because the
county as a unit of area is altogether too extensive for such co¬
ordinated researches. If a smaller area is chosen, especially one
with well-marked physical boundaries, then there is no reason
why all this information should not be provided. Furthermore
one might hope to see more attention given to the distribution and
ecology of non-vascular plants than has been the case in the past.
And perhaps local zoologists might be encouraged to compile a
supplementary volume on the fauna. The Clare Island Survey,
organized by the Royal Irish Academy, is an outstanding example
of such detailed collaboration amongst naturalists, and I still
think, of all relatively recent natural history undertakings, it was
quite the most worth while. The area chosen need not be any
larger than a few square miles, the number of workers could be
proportionately small, and the results might well be published
at a modest price in a small pocket-size volume, or even in the
pages of Watsonia or the Proceedings, perhaps over a series of
issues.

I am sure we are all inclined to be too grandiose when we
“define the area”, and I greatly regret the passing of the age when
the parson, the doctor, the schoolmaster or the local gentleman-
naturalist were content to concentrate their attention on one
small, much-traversed and much-loved area, so that they came
to know it thoroughly from every aspect. Nowadays we speed
from Land’s End to John O’ Groats in our fast cars, saying, like
Lord Dundreary, “I’ve been everywhere, and seen everything, and
there’s nothing in it”.

Discussion

Mr. Dandy opened the discussion by saying that Mr, Meikle had covered
the ground so excellently that it only remained for him to dot a few
i’s and cross a few t’s. What is a local Flora? By world standards the
“Flora Europaea” will be a local Flora. In the present context, however,
the outer limit is the boundary of the British Isles, and the local Flora
is one which deals with only a particular part of these islands. The first
necessity in Britain, as elsewhere, is to have a good standard national
Flora which gives a comprehensive account of the plants of the whole
country, and with which local Floras can dovetail. Such a national Flora
should provide a generally acceptable classification and correct nomencla¬
ture, and should incorporate descriptions of the plants, with keys to assist
in their identification. The local Flora, on the other hand, has no need
to repeat this descriptive identifying matter but should supplement the
national Flora by giving a far more detailed account than could be given

DEFINING THE AREA

25

in that Flora of the plants occurring in the restricted area concerned,
with precise information about their distribution, ecology, and so forth.
But what should the boundaries of such local Floras be? We can, of
course, have Floras of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland; local Floras,
it is true, but dealing with areas too large for the desired detail of
treatment. On the other hand we can have, as Mr. Meikle said. Floras
of specially interesting areas such as the Lake District. We have a Flora
of the London area, and there have been Floras (or at least floristic lists)
of such small units as football fields and pollarded willows. Such works
have their interest, but what is wanted ideally is a system of local Floras
which, side by side, cover the whole of the country, interesting and
unexciting areas alike; and furthermore (though this is scarcely practic¬
able) these Floras should be more or less simultaneously produced — a Flora
of say, Gloucestershire, produced very recently, is not really comparable
with a Flora of Essex published a hundred years ago. How can the country
be divided up most conveniently for local Floras in the sense he had
mentioned? He thought there were only two possible ways, bearing in
mind that the lines of division must be discernable on maps; (1) Grid
squares of selected size, and (2) counties. It had been pointed out that
Grid squares have no real appeal, and certainly they have the disadvant¬
age of having no names, no history and no actual boundaries on the
ground. Counties, on the other hand, have a number of advantages as
units for local Floras; (1) the country is wholly divided into counties,
so that if we have a Flora of every county we have the detailed Flora of
the whole country; (2) although there are a few exceptions, counties are
reasonably comparable in size; (3) the county is already the traditional
unit for local Floras in this country, and it is closely linked with the
vice-county system by which plants have chiefly been recorded during the
last century; (4) counties usually have boundaries which are discernible
in the field; (5) botanists often have county loyalties which act as an
additional stimulus in the production of county Floras.

The main difficulty about counties is that although they have long
histories there is no longer any guarantee of their stability ; their
boundaries alter periodically, and there are now proposals to make
drastic changes which might even mean the disappearance of some
counties altogether. If it is accepted that counties should be the basis
for our local Floras, then it is necessary to decide how we are to define
the counties in view of possible change. The answer to this, he thought,
was for each county Flora to cover the county in its broadest sense, that
is to say to cover the county as it is delimited to-day, together with any
other areas which have been included in the county during say the last
century (roughly the period in which the vice-county system has been in
use). By this means we can ensure that all the country is covered, and
the fact that there will be some overlapping is not really important. It
simply requires that the author of the Flora should clearly indicate the
limits of the territory he is dealing with, pointing out what boundary
changes have taken place in the past, and relating the whole area to
the vice-county system. Of course some county Floras have already been
produced on the.se lines, and in his opinion they provide examples to be
followed in the future.

26

LOCAL FLORAS

Mr. Lousley said Mr. Dandy had indicated one practical way of dealing
with the problem.

Mr. Westrup suggested that a re-definition of vice-counties be made
on the basis of the present counties as they have been in operation for
well over a century and have well defined borders, unlike many of
Watson’s vice-counties. The division of Hampshire was by a road which
had been very considerably re-routed not long after Watson’s time. He
also had in mind the parish of Martin (v.c. 8) which had originally been
in Wiltshire, is now in Hampshire and may well be transferred to Dorset
if the recently proposed boundary changes come into force.

Mr. Dandy said he was not suggesting the vice-county boundaries
should be altered. The minute they were altered the value of vice-counties
would be lost altogether. What he was suggesting was that county Floras
should indicate where there had been changes in vice-counties.

Mr. David said there were objections to both the vice-comital and the
Grid square system in defining the area. The vice-county is seldom a
natural area; an agglomeration of 10 Km. squares lacks character.
Division into geographical features was an alternative, but it would be
hard to cover all the ground in this way : when the “Flora of the
Malverns” and the “Flora of the Cotswolds’’ have been done, who will
want to get down to the “Flora of the Bit-between-Malverns-and-
Cotswolds”? In these days of co-operative teamwork, when perhaps
larger areas than the old vice-counties can be conveniently surveyed, was
there something to be said for making the Grid squares the basis but
grouping them into much larger areas than the county, e.g. into
“Peninsula’’ or “East Anglia’’, which have some natural coherence?

Dr. Dony said there was one big difficulty — that of defining the natural
areas. The Cotswolds as one example was covered by five or six counties.

Professor Hawkes thought there was a great deal to be .said for keeping
Watson’s vice-county boundaries as it would enable one to consult
historical areas and so save a great deal of trouble. The vice-county
boundary was similar to the county boundary in most cases and he wished
to make a strong plea for vice-county boundaries for Floras.

Mr. Hall asked whether the Society could sponsor some sort of
publication which would once and for all define the vice-county
boundaries? Mr. Smith wondered whether the expense was really worth
while.

Mr. Dandy said that a tremendous amount of work had been done
towards a vice-county publication and that a very great deal of material
exists in the form of marked maps, etc. These were awaiting their final
touches but should now be held back until the national changes have been
made. These maps are deposited in the Department of Botany at the
British Museum (Natural History), and are available for study by bona
fide students.

Dr. Bradshaw asked Mr. Dand}'^ whether these maps were consulted by
workers other than botanists? He replied that there were other depart¬
ments at the Museum, e.g. Zoology and Entomology, which made use of
the vice-county system.

DEFINING THE AREA

27

Mr. Gilbert said that so far little had been said about the Grid square
system. One of the troubles of such a system was that boundaries are
not defined, whereas parish boundaries are clearly defined by roads,
dykes, etc.

Mr. Chandler pointed out that one found the same difficulty in county
boundaries as for example when rivers altered their course. Mr. Allen
thought someone should mention mobile plants!

Mr. Stage stated that good Grid records are one of the best for local
Floras and asked whether there was any real need for conformity in
method of approach over the whole country. He suggested that the
Weald, because of its distinct geological series, would provide a very good
basis for a Flora and he felt that if such areas were overlooked people
were missing a great opportunity.

Mr. Dandy was not advocating county Floras as a sole basis for the
complete mapping of information over the whole of the country, nor was
he deprecating the publication of interesting Floras of areas such as the
Weald. He was simply thinking of the practical value of a uniform survey
made of the whole country.

Mr. Seddon thought there would be great difficulties in using natural
or arbitrary boundaries. He thought the 1 Km. Grid square was a
sufficiently small unit for practical purposes and he reminded the con¬
ference that a point could be defined with a six-figure Grid reference of
satisfactory accuracy for plotting distribution. He was in favour of
using the Grid square within the county as the unit for publication.

Mrs. Le Sueur considered the use of squares the most useful way of
collecting records, but Dr. Perring could not imagine anyone writing a
Flora of one square.

28

LOCAL FLORAS

DIVIDING THE AREA

F. H. Perring

Two questions have to be asked about dividing the area :
“Why?” and “How?”, To the question “Why?” the answer falls
into two main categories : (i) for the collection of the data, and (ii)
for the orderly presentation of those data in the published work;
and to the question “How?” the number of answers is infinite,
but I shall try to elaborate the main methods which have been
used in the past and make suggestions about those which seem
most suitable for meeting present-day conditions and for satis¬
fying the reasons put forward for dividing the area in the first
place.

Though local Floras were first written over 300 years ago it has
only been during the last 100 years or so that there has been
a feeling that division of the area was necessary. This is hardly
surprising. In the early days local botanists were trying to
produce satisfactory county lists — a process which culminated in
Watson being able to produce Topographical Botany in 1873. By
then we had, as it were, divided the country into counties or vice¬
counties as units of botanical study. After Topographical Botany
the counties themselves could be divided. This was clearly not a
very conscious process — dividing of counties in the south had
begun before listing of all those in the north and west had been
completed.

The first county Flora I have found which discusses the problem
of dividing the area is Flora Hertfordiensis by R. H. Webb and
W. H. Coleman (1849). In it there is an appendix by Coleman
on the plan of the Flora ; he is mainly concerned with arguments
for dividing the county so that the collection of the data shall be
as even as possible : —

“In collecting materials for the present work, it was soon dis¬
covered that it would give but a verj^ imperfect view of the
botanical productions of the county collectively, unless not only
diligent search had been made for the rarer species in every part
of it, but also some security could be given that the prevalence of
the plants presumed to be common was really general throughout
it”. He went on to say that the authors realised at one stage that
the publication proposed could not be called a Flora of Hertford¬
shire but merely one of Hertford, Hitchin and St, Albans. So
Webb and Coleman set out deliberately to make a suitable
division of the countv so that thev would studv it svstematicallv.

4^ 4 4 4

DIVIDING THE AREA

29

Unevenness of survey is a fault which can be levelled against
nearly every local Flora which has been published, but it has
become very apparent to me that, despite the foresight and warn¬
ing given by Coleman 113 years ago, some county Floras have been
published during the last 25 years in which part of the area has
hardly been investigated at all. In one, for example, from which
I attempted to get lists by 10 Km. squares the product varied
from 500 species down to 50. Moreover, it is not only that certain
corners have hardly been visited, but there has been a too ready
assumption that the common species in the immediate area of
one’s home are in fact common throughout the county. This was
brought out by Good in his Geographical Handbook of the Dorset
Flora. Good made 7,500 lists in the county and then arranged
species in order of frequency. He compared this order with state¬
ments in the Flora of Dorset by Mansel-Pleydell that species were
“common or generally distributed”. He found these statements
covered species which he had recorded on 4,000 occasions as well
as some which he had seen only 40 times. My own work in
extracting records for the Maps Scheme has made me aware of
how loosely applied has been the use of the term ‘common’ in
Floras in the past, and not infrequently I find only this bare state¬
ment when I have received no records for a species from a county
during the last eight years.

Clearly then two reasons for dividing the area to collect the
data exist, to ensure that the county is surveyed evenly and to
ensure that a proper study is made of all the species in the flora,
not just the rarities.

In considering why we should divide the area for presentation
of the data we must bear in mind the user who, as far as distribu¬
tion data is concerned, usually has two questions — Where can I
find it ? and Has he got it from there ? The first question is surely
mainly directed towards the rare and local species, particularly
for the visitor who needs some indications which will give him
some hope of finding what he is looking for. Not so precise that
there is no sense of re- discovery, not so vague that he will waste
his time in every case. Thus a completely geometrical or even
parish distribution will not be satisfactory for the rare and local
species.

On the other hand ‘has he got it from there ? ’ can apply to the
whole Flora, and a published summary in a convenient form of the
known distribution of the species can enable the user to discover
whether or not he has made an interesting discovery which should
be passed to the author or his heirs. Now here the size of the
areas is very relevant. If the units are very large the user is
going to find great difficulty in making any new contribution, if
it is too small the author may be bombarded with additions. I
shall return to this when I have dealt with the problem of how the
area is to be divided; but I feel we must constantly keep the user
of the Flora in mind when we set about dividing the area.

30

LOCAL FLORAS

How then is the area to be divided if we can now agree that
divided it must be? Once again we can return to Webb and
Coleman (1849) for an early discussion of the problem. They
tried :

(i) Dividing the county into regions within a 5 m. radius of
the main towns.

(ii) Constructing hexagons by joining points bisecting the
distance between every two adjacent principal towns.

Both these were rejected as being impossible to follow in the
held and so they hit upon the idea of using river basins. There
were twelve in Hertfordshire, a county of 528 square miles — thus
the average size of a river basin was only 44 sq. miles — though the
variation w^as somewhat large, from 29 to 76 sq. miles, i.e. ratio
1:2^. It is important to realise that in the county in which the
method was pioneered the areas were reasonably small (a little
larger than a 10 Km. square) and numerous — for this method was
accepted without much argument by subsequent generations of
Flora writers — though it was rejected at once by Babington who
wrote in his Flora of Cambridgeshire (1860): “The river basins
cannot be used, for we can hardly be said to have more than one,
indeed it is rather the elevations which point out a difference in
the vegetation than the depressions”.

Webb and Coleman actually used their river basins as collect¬
ing units and I would like to refer you all to Coleman’s description
of their method (p. 364).

“The following was our method of cataloguing. A book was
prepared, containing thirteen columns, the first of which was
occupied by the names of the plants thought likely to occur in
the county, and the remaining twelve, corresponding to the
number of the districts, were left blank, intended for the record
of the species when found in each district. Some promising spot,
as central as possible within any district, was then repaired to,
and the observer started on his walk with a small vasculum in
hand, in which he deposited a small characteristic “pinch” (no
larger than was absolutely necessary for identification) of every
species that occurred. When the box became full, or a convenient
halting place was reached, the prepared list was taken in hand
and deliberately read through ; and as often as it occurred to the
memory that such a species had been gathered, a figure corres¬
ponding to the number of the district was entered in the proper
column opposite to its name. When the list had been gone
through seriatim, the collecting box was opened, and its contents
singly but rapidly removed; and if it was doubted concerning
any of them whether or not it had been recorded, the book was
referred to; but this was seldom found necessary; scarcely more
than one per cent, being generally omitted in the first marking.
The box being emptied, the walk was resumed, and a second
collection made of everything not previously recorded. In this
manner as many as 300 species have been catalogued in a single

DIVIDING THE AREA

31

day. If two collect together this process is much expedited, and
in default of leisure on the part of the principal at any particular
season, the services of a beginner maj^ be made use of, to bring
or send from the district a fragment of every species he may
meet with. The process should be repeated at several different
points of each district, and in different seasons of the year : but
to prevent confusion no two districts should be visited on the
same day”.

It in fact differed very little from the methods which have been
used to collect records for the Maps Scheme and which we have
used in preparing the new Flora of Cambridgeshire.

Webb and Coleman actually used the river basins both for
collecting and publishing their results but though the two are
related it can surely not be possible in many cases. Thus in
Grose’s Flora of Wiltshire there are eight river basins with an
average area of over 200 square miles yet Grose made 4,500 lists
scattered over the county in collecting his data.

All the arguments used in determining how to collect records
for the Maps Scheme in the British Isles as a whole are relevant
to the problem of dividing the county. It has been thought out
in a number of European countries since 1900, e.g. Goethart and
Jongmans (1902) who prepared plant maps of the Pays-Bas in
Holland using rectangles as a basis 1045 m. x 1250 in. These
units were adopted for the country in 1930. In 1940 rectangles
were adopted in Belgium and by the 1950s the system was ex¬
tended to Luxembourg. Luxembourg’s experience is relevant in
considering our own counties. It is an area of 50 x 35 miles,
about the size of one of our medium English counties, e.g. Suffolk.
In a recent paper on the Luxembourg project (Reichling, 1956)
the organiser discusses the division of the area hy political units
and, speaking of the British vice-county system he says, “Incon¬
venient : les surfaces ainsi fixees sont souvent de tres inegale
etendue et de forme bizarre”.

And so would be any division of a county by political
boundaries or physical features. In Cambridgeshire our parishes
vary in size from just over 100 acres in the south to something like
30 square miles in the fens — and their shapes are certainly bizarre.

Thus I believe that for collecting the data it would be better
to choose some form of artificial grid system based on the National
Grid, unless some natural division by chance gave areas of almost
equal size or are obvious, in the same way that islands might be,
for example, in the Orkneys and Shetlands, though even here some
method would have to be chosen to subdivide the larger units.

The most obvious basic unit is the 10 Km. Grid square. It is
marked on all ordnance survey maps and the 2\" series cover
exactly one 10 Km. square at present — though the new issue just
commencing is 2 x 1| 10 Km. squares. Despite the objections first
raised by Coleman that a purely geometrical system was
impractical we must remember that maps issued to-day are far
better, and with field boundaries and all buildings marked there is

LOCAL FLORAS

9 9
o ^

really no difficulty in the field. Our experience with the Maps
Scheme has shown this.

The advantages of using the 10 Km. square at this time are
that, whilst a national scheme exists records made in a county
can be fed into it whilst, reciprocally, any records made now or in
the future by botanists during their field trips will be available
for anyone meeting the challenge of producing a new county Flora
later. Thus if, in 1970, someone starts to work on the Flora of
Radnorshire the 10 Km. sq. records made in 1955 will be a useful
starting point for his researches.

But, I am only suggesting 10 Km. square as a basic unit. For
most counties such a unit will be too large for a thorough survey
of the flora. The average vice-county has a little over 20 whole

10 Km. squares — a number of units of the same order as that by
which Hertfordshire was divided over 100 years ago.

A 10 Km. square can be subdivided, and it is important at the
outset to decide by how much. This decision depends upon manj^
factors : the main ones are probably :

(i) Number of botanists available (or botanical time).

(ii) Variety of the terrain.

(hi) Publication envisaged.

(i) The question must be asked — How many lists can be made
m, for example, 10 years, taking into account the amount of help
one can expect to receive from other botanists? And can I deal

with all the data collected in the summer during the winter?
One’s own age and health must be considered here. The sort of
calculation I suggest goes as follow^s : —

Maximum number of lists / square / week . 4

Number of weeks/annum . 25

Number of lists / square/annum . 100

Number of lists /square/ 10 years . 1000

Number of visits to each square . 3

Number of units into which to divide area ... c.350
Average No. of 10 Km. squares / v. -county ... 25

Number of divisions/ 10 Km. sq . 12-16

If you divide a 10 Km. square into smaller squares using the
Grid lines there are three possibilities ;

(i) 4x5 Km. squares.

(ii) 25 X 2 Km. squares.

(hi) 100 X 1 Km. squares.

A final decision must depend upon the terrain and the assist¬
ance you can expect but I believe there is no need to be a slave
to the square or the fine details of the grid. If you want 16
squares/ 10 Km. sq. then use a 2^ Km. square — it will take less
time to mark your set of 2J" maps than to cover all those extra
squares three times each. Of course county boundaries do not

DIVIDING THE AREA

33

follow neatly along Grid lines and there is the problem of what
to do with the little pieces left over when you have adopted some
sort of grid system. This is precisely the same problem as we
have had with coastal fragments in the Maps Scheme. Our
answer there has been to combine records for those portions with
adjacent squares for publishing purposes though the records in
them have been collected separately.

Lest you should think me too much of a square I would like to
make a suggestion for those who are writing new Floras and have
inherited a county already divided — shall we say into river basins.
Then your problem is very much like the Maps Scheme had when
inheriting the British Isles already divided into vice-counties. If
you want to keep your river basins, and it is often difficult to do
away with them, if you wish to integrate old records with the new,
I suggest you divide the county by squares but where they are
crossed by the old division lines collect separate records for each
portion.

Finally, as I have already indicated, the way in which the data
are to be presented must be kept in mind, as well as the way in
wdiich people are going to use your Flora.

Two points it is essential to be clear about :

(1) Collection and presentation can be quite independent.
Thus in Cambridgeshire we have collected from a random scatter
of 1 Km. squares but presented the results on a 10 Km. basis.
This was possible — for our geology is very simple, wath large areas
of similar terrain. For the widespread species we have been
content to use the convention ‘All Squares’ to indicate the pre¬
sence of the species throughout the county.

This leads naturally to the second point:

(2) It may not be necessary to deal wath all species in the
same way.

(a) Common species. Those which occur in all squares
throughout the county. The user of the Flora is not going
to require further information particularly if some habitat
note is added. Probably about J of the species are in this
class.

(b) Rare species. These are species which, as far as is known
have only one or two localities in the county. The account
of each will be very full. Localities may be ‘classical’ and
the author will have to make a special study — checking the
locality of each to confirm continued existence or
extinction. This group probably accounts for another J of
the total flora.

(c) Medium species. This group is the largest and most
interesting. In Cambridgeshire we have expressed their
distribution as a list of 10 Km. squares and included a map
which shows where these squares are situated. We also use

34

LOCAL FLORAS

symbols to distinguish the date period of the records : since
1950, 1930-1950, before 1930. As I have already explained
we believe this is acceptable in Cambridgeshire with its
simple geology — an additional statement such as “in
Boulder-clay woods”, “in chalk grassland”, etc., means
that the user can readily refind the plant and he can also
see whether he has made a new discovery of some import¬
ance.

In a more complex terrain I think it would be well worth
while considering producing dot-maps of the 4-500 species in¬
volved in this group using your 3-400 units. This will enable you
to discover the main types of distribution in the county. If you
can afford it, of course, to include maps of each in the Flora w’ould
be ideal, but failing this — and generally the cost will prohibit it —
it may be possible to include about a dozen maps as, for example,
in the Flora of Wiltshire, representative of the various types, and
to which reference may be made when describing the distribution
of any of the medium species.

Summary

1. Division of the county is essential both for collecting the
Data and its presentation.

2. Any division of the county is likely to have disadvantages :
the advantages of adhering to the Grid system are that it
gives equal areas and national co-operation.

3. Collection and presentation are different problems but it is
possible to devise a system which deals with three classes of
species. Common, Medium and Rare, and presents their
distribution in relation to the Grid system whilst at the
same time answering those two fundamental questions :
‘Where can I find it?’ and ‘Has it been seen here before?’.

References

Goethart, J. W. C. & JoNGMANS, W. J. (1902), Planten Kaartjes voor
Nederland, Leiden.

Reichling, L. (1956), Application de Cartes a Reseau au Recensement
Floristique du Grand-Duche de Luxembourg. Bull. Soc. Nat.
Lux., 61, 12.

Watson, H. C. (1873), Topographical Botany, London.

Webb, R. H. & Coleman, W. H. (1849), Flora Hertfordiensis, London.

Discussion

Mr. Hall said that if in opening this discussion he was expected to
disagree violently with most of what Dr. Perring has said, then he feared
the conference would be disappointed. The paper presented had clearly
shown that only by the systematic division of a given area, followed by
properly organised field work in each division, can reliable distribution
data be obtained. Furthermore, the convenience of using the National

DIVIDING THE AREA

35

Grid as the basis for these divisions seems to him to be indisputable. Dr.
Perring had explained how the 10-kilometre square, as used for the Maps
Scheme, could be broken down into smaller squares; by the use of rect¬
angles, perhaps less convenient on the ground, a rather wider range of
sub-division is possible without the use of pen and ruler. By ignoring the
10-kilometre squares altogether and regarding one’s area as merely
covered by a grid whose ultimate unit is a 1-kilometre square, an almost
unlimited choice becomes available. However, to adopt such a course
would mean some degree of incompatibility with the national 10-kilometre
system, and it is probably dangerous even to suggest such a heresy in
this company. Be that as it may the principle remains the same; divide
your area into the smallest units you can cope with, search these
systematically and you will have more reliable distribution data than your
predecessor.

The advantages of the grid-square system for collecting their records
have already been recognised by some of our members who are writing
or revising county Floras; Dr. Perring has described the work in
Cambridgeshire. A favourite unit is the so-called ‘tetrad’, a 2 X 2 kilo¬
metre square, which is being used by Mr. E. S. Edees in Staffordshire —
some of us had the pleasure of seeing his beautifully kept records in July
— and by workers in Hertfordshire, Hampshire, Warwickshire and Surrey.
He had chosen these examples deliberately since they might be used to
demonstrate the differences in detail which had been adopted. In the
first three counties mentioned, what he supposed might be called the
standard technique was used : all species seen in each tetrad are recorded,
using printed cards, just as was done in 10-kilometre squares for the Maps
Scheme. Professor Hawkes will tell you in his paper of the planned
statistical approach adopted in Warwickshire. In Surrey some 300
species had been classified as ‘common’ and were omitted from the field
record cards. Distribution data for these species are thus limited to
Maps Scheme records on a 10-kilometre square basis. Had these species
been looked for in each tetrad these distribution data would have been
25 times more accurate, and he thought that a great opportunity has been
missed of accumulating information which would be of particular value
in a county so near to London and subject to continuous change.

Having collected the data, we are faced with the second, quite distinct
problem of turning them into a Flora. He was very glad that Dr. Perring
had emphasised this point, since at one time he was so absorbed with the
grid and mechanical methods that I feared the new Cambridgeshire Flora
would be published as a portfolio of punched cards, for playing on some
kind of botanical pianola. For his part, the one feature of the grid
system which would bear direct incorporation into a Flora was, as already
suggested, the dot-map to demonstrate significant distribution patterns.
For the rest, let it be absorbed into one of the older patterns, river basins,
geological formations if need be, but preferably into parishes, using these
units of historical and personal interest, however bizarre their shape, to
clothe our skeleton-grid of dry facts with flesh and bring it to life as a true
local Flora.

Mr. Hall said he would like to end with two quotations from The
Bristol Flora (1912), James Walter White’s masterpiece, already extolled

36

LOCAL FLORAS

by two previous speakers. Apart from the Gloucester/ Somerset boundary,
White rejects dividing his area, saying in his introduction, “It has not
seemed desirable to parcel out the area into a number of botanical districts
which at best would have been largely artificial, whether the attempt
were based on river drainage or upon geological formations”. However,
those tempted to follow this example are urged to take heed also of
White’s final aim expressed when he says that “He has included in this
compilation every noteworthy fact within his knowledge of the district”.
What better aim could our modern author have?

Mr. Swann admitted that he often felt confused when he was collecting
as to exactly which river valley he was in, but he had found the grid lines
much easier. Mrs. Le Sueur pointed out that the Grid lines had not been
drawn to include Jersey and she thought Mr. Swann might be interested
to know that they were using lines of latitude and longitude. These
actually gave too tall a square for their use so they divided them up into
rectangles of approximately one square kilometre.

Dr. Perring still felt parishes were a very inconvenient unit.
Obviously for the rarer species one would mention that it grows in
such a place, but for the common species some sort of reference to a
distribution map would be perfectly adequate. If one wished to retain
boundaries, one could record the river basins rather like counties in the
British Isles and mark in the river basins on the grid.

Mr. Westrup noted that the watersheds between the river valleys
shown in the earlier Floras did not correspond with those on modern
ordnance maps : thus many old records cannot be incorporated unless
they are re-interpreted. There was also a discrepancy between civil and
ecclesiastical parishes and the present-day wards did not correspond with
old parishes in urban areas.

Dr. H. Milne-Redhead did not think there could be unity between
“presenting the data” and “collecting the data”. The collection of data
should be by well-known methods, but the presentation must surely vary
according to the county, the individual personality producing the Flora,
his workers and whether there were a lot of old records or other special
information.

Mr. Douglas Smith thought there was an enormous benefit for the
average person to use parishes as the basis for a Flora; such people would
become discouraged if, when wishing to look up a plant, they were faced
with a string of Grid references. The parish was the best basis for
expressing it in English.

VlCt^COUJtTV

M.'ii) of W.i i w icKslii l e >^li()v. iiii: 1 km. s(]ii;i re.^^ coniijleU'd Itl.u k hum! ;iml
licinL: sii iv cyci I (L>it\\ humi in llie :niliimii ol I'.'iii TIm" uiio-m rum- siii\<'\

\ii-lii;ill\ (■um|il;'h‘d li\ iIm' •mil 'il I'.ihl

AJUAi BAIMb

ACTtVlXY *U«V«VI»

toMOierro

^lill
w ; m

COLLECTING THE DATA

37

C0LLECT5MG THE DATA

A description of the methods used in the current revision of the

Flora of Warwickshire

J. G. Hawkes and R. C. Readett

The methods used in compiling the Warwickshire County Flora
scheme owe much to the work of R. Good (A Geographical Hand¬
book of the Dorset Flora, 1948) wdiere “Stands” of species were
recorded at various points or “loci”, spaced evenly through the
county, and distribution maps were constructed from the data so
obtained. Although Good attempted to make “stand” lists from
as many habitats as possible we felt that too great an element of
subjectivity was admitted here. By making an arbitrary
selection of stands, mostly in natural or semi-natural habitats,
one runs the risk of overestimating the frequency of the species
normally found in such habitats, and of underestimating the fre¬
quency of species which occur chiefly in highly artificial habitats,
such as refuse or tip heaps, gardens, waste land, etc.

We therefore decided to base our work on area recording,
rather than on locus or point recording, and we chose for our unit
the 1 Km. square which we designated the “basic square”. We
soon realized that it would be impossible to record from every
basic square in the county and we modified the method by con¬
sidering the squares in blocks of four (“tetrads”) and selecting
one square at random from each tetrad for surveying. With this
method it has now been possible to record from one quarter of
the county, and to ensure at the same time that the survey is
evenly spread over the whole area. (See Plate 2.)

The reasons for asking our collaborators to make an intensive
study of one square in the tetrad rather than to send us a list of
plants taken from the complete area 4 Km^ are mainly concerned
with the habitat and frequency estimates that we require them
to make.

In surveying a 1 Km. square collectors are asked to make at
least three visits during the year and to send us at the end of the
season a species list (preferably alphabetically arranged) on the
special forms provided (Figs. 1 and 2). They are issued with a
special card of instructions (Figs. 3-6) and are asked to give an
estimate of the habitat or habitats in which the species are found
and to add a note of their frequency in the various habitats. This
is difficult enough to do over 1 Km“ since it means that the con¬
scientious collector should wander into every field, wood and
coppice and try to survey the hedgerows, ponds, ditches, canals.

38

LOCAL FLORAS

streams and any other features, in order to arrive at his estimate.
It would be quite impossible to accomplish this on a 4 Km. basis.

Again, with data on as fine a scale as 1 Km^ we shall be able to
correlate distribution of species much more accurately with soils,
drift geology and other features than would be possible on the
4 sq. km. method of survey. If the rarer species are missed by
recording from only one square in four this matters very little.
Our method is chiefly concerned with recording the distribution,
habitat and frequency of the commoner species. In general, we
already possess information on the rarer species, to which con¬
siderable attention was paid by the older botanists; however, we

Collector’s N&mei _ _ Basic Square Not

Dates! _ Basic square locality!, _

_ Flora used I _

Latin Nan8»

Hab.

Froq

Hab.

Freq.

Hab.

Freq.

Location and/or any
further remarks.

. .

1

•

1

1

U -

Fig. 1. Collector’s Form for the flora of Warwickshire survey.

COLLECTING THE DATA

39

j fcN L CHi)

Collect'or's name • . . . . P; . . Basic Square No:.Ai^^.

Dates; , . APlAl*. Basic square locality: . .

Sept 1959 Hay Brook .

'The principal feature is a steep escarpment, • 'i'* •

appa'ren\ly‘ calcaVeouA; *(JoVeVfea' *lCif 'scrub and ® ^

rough y;rass, a continuation of the Red Hill and Aston Grove ridge

Latin name

Hab .

Freq .

Hab.

Freq .

Hab.

Freq.

Location and/or

any further
rem a r ks .

M-hr

r

^Achillea miUef Plium

M-ro

f

Aethusa cynapiua

C-f

la

^Agrimonia eupatoria

M-hr

If

G-ai

If

Airropyron repens

M-hr

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Agrostis stolonifera^

G-r

0

SPECIMEN

< tPniiiB

G-r

If

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Wa-r

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/

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Ws-p

la

y*~Alliaria netiolata _

M-hr

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Alopecurus geniculatus

C-f

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0-B =

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Conf. Mr. Readett

/ Aneaane neaerona

M-hr

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SPECIMEN

V 3£: —

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WA-r

If

Fiff. 2. A sample page of a species list for square 42/1155, arranged
alphabetically, and sliowing tlie metiiod of habitat and fiequency notation. (For

explanation of symbols see figs. 4-5).

40

LOCAL FLORAS

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COLLECTING THE DATA

41

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Fiijs. .'FG. Flni-a ol' WaTwirksliire Collector’s Card, with brief instructions on
the methods of field recordinfi: to he adopted.

44

LOCAL FLORAS

shall make a point of checking the old records before the end of
the survey to see whether the rarer species are still to be found
growing in their old haunts.

When the lists are sent in they are carefully “screened” and
doubtful records checked with the collectors. Voucher specimens
of species belonging to difficult groups are brought in by the
collectors in most cases and these are checked by us at the time
or after sorting. When the scheme started we sent sets of speci¬
mens to national experts for naming and this we still do when we
feel it to be necessary. However, with the named sets in front of
us, and with an increasing knowledge, we have ourselves taken
responsibility for naming the more straight-forward material since
if we had not done so the national experts would have become
completely inundated with material from Warwickshire.

The data from the plant lists are transferred to species cards
(see fig. 7) of which there is a separate series for each 10 x 10 Km.
Grid square. The species cards are ruled with a grid of 100 one
Km. squares at the scale of I" to the mile and the records of
habitat and frequency are entered in the correct spatial relation¬
ship. Each card is thus a stylized I" to the mile distribution map
for a particular species in a particular 10 x 10 Km. square. By
placing all the cards for a given species together in the correct
order we can construct an interim distribution map of that species
for the whole county (see fig. 8 for a portion of the N.W. corner);
thus at any time we can check our records and remove anomalies
from the maps, think about the reasons for certain distribution
patterns and ask for additional data or observations from our
collectors — all this before the final maps are drawn up.

Since we have now finished the “basic square” recordings and
are about to embark on a one or two years’ period of checking
through the records in the field, the value of our map-index cards
will be at once apparent. A blank space on the index card may
indicate that the species was absent, but it could mean that the
collector did not visit the square when the plant was in flower,
or alternatively that he was not able to recognize it. Most of us
have “blind spots” in our knowledge of plants, but it is obviously
most important that these blind spots should not be represented
on our distribution maps !

For this reason we are planning the final 1-2 years’ work on
record checking; we shall also be asking our collectors to look
for the rarer species, whether within the random squares or not,
that are known to have been found some time before the begin¬
ning of the present survey (1960) but have not been seen since.

In publishing the Flora we hope to produce a volume of
distribution maps of all but the rarer species, in addition to a
volume of text. On each map we hope to show, not onlj" the
presence of the species in question in all the squares for which it
has been recorded, but also the habitat or habitats in which it
has been found. To do this we have proposed a series of symbols
(see fig. 9), each one representing one of the major habitat group-

COLLECTING THE DATA

45

mgs. Since a species may occur in more than one habitat it is
important that such symbols should not be mutually concealing
and that two or three can be placed over each other on the same
square without loss of legibility. Furthermore, the symbols should
be easily recognizable at a glance when viewed on the map as a
whole and it should not be necessary to refer to their position
within a square to interpret their meaning. Unfortunately, we
have not yet been able to devise a system showing frequency as
well as habitat. Nevertheless it will be possible to get a general
idea of frequency by noting the number of squares in which a
species occurs compared with the blank squares in which it has not
been recorded.

Kiff. 7. Species Iiide.x Card. Th.is i-epi'esents an index card and distribution inai)
for a single species in a 10 x 10 kin. squai’e, on which the records of liahitat and
frequency can he entered in tlie correct spatial i-elationship. Tor furthei'

explanation see text.

46

LOCAL FLORAS

Fi<r. 8. Four species index cards of Chaiuaenerion angustifuUuiu 42,08;

42/17; 42 18) placed together to form a map on which the interim distribution
picture can he clearly seen. The vice-county boundary has also been marked
on these cards. Note the group of loadside and ruderal records towards the top
left-hand corner, coinciding with the centre of Birmingham !

COLLECTING THE DATA

47

j WO

• ws

— w

H

o

/ G

\ G

□ R

Woodland (including scrub and derelict wood)

Waterside (including fresh water marsh)
Water

Heath (including bog and acid grassland)
Marginal (hedgerow, roadside, etc.)

Grassland (excluding acid grassland)

Cultivated land (arable fields, allotments)

Ruderal (waste ground, rubbish tips, etc.)

Fif;'. 9. INIap symbols repi-esentiiig' llie major lialntat {’roupiiif^s.

A sample map for Urtica dioica (fig. 10) is shown below, in
which the preponderance of marginal records (hedgerow, in this
case) is clearly visible.

The published volume of maps will contain transparent outline
maps on the same scale as the species distribution maps, giving
information on soils, surface geology, urbanization and com¬
munications, etc. It will thus be possible to place these over the
species maps and to draw further conclusions about their distribu¬
tion.

Since the choice of 1 km. squares surveyed was based on a
random selection in each tetrad it will be possible to make use of
the habitat data from them for a mathematical analysis of species
preference for, and spread into, certain habitats. This would not
have been possible if we had chosen squares from the tetrads that
seemed “interesting”, since our picture of the habitat preference
of the species would then have been biased. We hope to be able
to publish a separate volume of text in which these habitat studies
and other data of interest are included, together with the usual
introductory surveys of topography, geology, history of botanical
work in the County and other matters.

This survey has engaged the sparetime efforts of quite a large
number of botanists from Warwickshire and elsewhere, both in
the field and the herbarium. Without their help we could not
have begun this Flora, much less bring it to its present stage, and
we should here like to express our thanks to them for all the
enthusiastic co-operation we have received.

48

LOCAL FLORAS

WARWlCKSHiRE COUNTY FLORA
DISTRIBUTION OF URTiCA DOCA

Fiji'. 10. Intoriiu iii;ip sliowiiiii' tli6 distribution uiid luiltitut of I iticd dioica in

WarwicUsliire.

COL-LECTIMG THE DATA

49

Discussion

Dr. S. M. Walters opened the discussion by congratulating the Warwick¬
shire botanists on the energy and enthusiasm w’hich they had shown in
collecting data for this ambitious county flora survey. He said that
there was much that Professor Plawkes had said in his admirably clear
account which invited discussion and comment but he was selecting only
three points. He thought the attempt to collect habitat and frequency
data was very laudable and showed a greater faith in the ability and
willingness of botanists to provide such information than the Society’s
Maps Scheme had shown, and he wished to know whether they found
much difflcuity in collecting or interpreting the data? Secondly, Dr.
Walters expressed an interest in the interpretive text which it was planned
should be included as the text volume of the Flora, and he wondered
how far the Editors thought of going in this direction? Lastly, he sought
further information on how serious the problem of access to private land
had proved in such a detailed survey.

Professor Hawkes replied that in estimating frequency there was
obviously a subjective element and he did not see how it could be other¬
wise. He thought it would be agreed that all these estimates have to be
an approximation and short of doing a detailed ecological survey there
was no alternative. They realised that there may be some discrepancy
but would this matter very much if the final estimates are expressed
in the following form : i. Frequent to abundant; ii. Rare to occasional. He
felt that in the end a true picture would be obtained and slight errors
and inconsistencies would cancel out. Another way of arriving at
frequency was to see how many squares a plant had been recorded from
and how many times it had been recorded.

Replying to the question concerning access to sites. Professor Hawkes
said that some people had experienced difficulty and some people had seen
the landowners beforehand. They had found that the nearer they were
to Birmingham or Coventry the more difficult it was, while further into
the country it was a great deal easier. Mr. Readett said that sometimes
it had been helpful to show collecting cards.

Professor tiawkes concluded his reply to Dr. Walters by stating that
the interpretation which they intended to include in the second volume
would only be that which came within the scope of the Flora to assist
those using the maps which would constitute the first volume.

Dr. Dony asked when was a square considered to be complete?

Professor Hawkes pointed out that they did not normally accept a list
with less than 100 records unless the square was in a built-up area.
Probably most squares in Warwickshire contain from about 200-350
species according to location. They do not ask people to obtain the very
last record from a square since there comes a point in the survey of a
square when the time spent is hardly commensurate with the extra
number of species to be found.

Mr. Readett added that there were fewer species from the eastern
squares than from those in the west which was probably due to historical
factors. The Forest of Arden, in the west, which had been lost relatively
recently was a particularly rich area; whereas in the “felden” district
where the squares were under an open field system of agriculture in
Saxon times and have been cultivated ever since are often very poor.

50

LOCAL FLORAS

PROBLEMS OF IDENTIFICATION

C. C. Townsend

We have now reached approxiiiiatelj* the halfway mark in
this sjanposium, and have already heard a great deal on the work
involved in a local Flora ; this, and what is to come, demonstrates
that the author of one must be a man of considerable ability. He
may be a good critical botanist (e.g., C. E. Salmon, or J. W. White
— whose stature is indicated by the fact that I am the fourth
speaker to hold his work up as an example quite independently),
or he may be average but with the ability to co-ordinate the
efforts of those whom he may call upon to assist. Certainly there
IS kudos attached to one’s name as the author of a local Flora, but
only if it is a good one, and in these days when botanical work in
Britain is so intensive, errors and inadequacies will not be long in
coming to light.

The author of a local Flora is unlike the author of a national
Flora. Because he is studying and recording for a smaller area in
greater detail he has to enlist and use to the best advantage a very
diverse group of people, in much the same way that the Maps
Scheme has in recent years. Some may be very good botanists —
better, indeed, than the author himself, but either with conscious¬
ness of no talent for organisation or else with no particular taste
for the job; some may be schoolteachers or schoolchildren or
ordinary flower lovers with little interest in critical taxonomy but
willing to collect, attempt determination and submit specimens
for checking. These present problems, and it is here that our
author will use his referees. At this point we must define a referee.
Really, he is not unlike a football referee — he gives judgment on
an action performed, in this case the identification of a plant. He
is NOT someone to whom plants may be sent to save the collector
the task of naming them himself. Thus, the author of a local Flora
should encourage all his correspondents to at least have a go at
their plants before sending them to a referee. In this way he will
in the end save himself work as his helpers grow in the knowledge
that effort brings, and keep the co-operation of his referees. The
keenest referee is deterred when someone continually sends in
specimens with no apparent signs of effort on his own part, par¬
ticularly when the same thing returns time after time after time.
There is no need to conceal one’s attempt through shame, for all
referees have at one time or another used referees themselves and
made the same mistakes which their correspondents will make. It
is this fact that makes them cpialified to help. The job of a referee
is to tell a correspondent, if he is wrong, WHY he is wrong. This

PKOJBLEiVlS OF IDENTIFICATION

• 51

lie cannot do if the correspondent does not give his tentative
determination.

What is the biggest difficulty which a referee has to face in
making an identification? There are many which will come to
mind as causing trouble — the natural phenomena which breed
critical groups. Apomixis; abrupt geographical separation associ¬
ated with slight character differences; prevalent hybridisation;
extreme plasticity in response to ecological conditions. But the
average referee wdll, I am sure, agree that next to his own
ignorance of his group (so commendably admitted by Edees in
his paper on “The difficulties of a Rubus referee), the chief trouble
is simply — inadequate material. In fact, it often seems to me that
the reason a correspondent has sent a specimen to a referee is
that the specimen is too inadequate for him to name himself but
he is reluctant to throw it away. Thus another job of the author
of a local Flora will be to advise on collecting; to point out to
helpers who go about in twos or threes that if, for instance, a
casual is found, one person should take the whole plant*. It should
not be torn asunder to provide a piece for each member of the
party and thus create extra difficulties, perhaps insuperable, for
the referee who has to examine one of these scraps. Likewise, if it
is required to show a mystery plant to the author, it should be
pressed first ; then if it proves necessary to refer it to a referee, he
will not have to look at something resembling boiled cabbage or
dried herbs. The irremediable scrap collector of the Kniphof
school is of course usually the type who collects plants as others
collect postage stamps — to have a new name in his collection
either as a specimen or as a name ticked off on a list. Our author
may find that to encourage him is more trouble than it is worth.

There is another preliminary difficulty with which our author
may deal. Opinions vary as to difficult groups. Once I gave a
talk to a local Natural History Society in which I observed that
perhaps the easiest of the larger families in the British flora is
the Urnbelliferae. The subdued chuckle which greeted these
words is with me yet. But it is so, and I would suggest that the
reason why many plant lovers find difficulty witii them is the use
of unsuitable literature. It is very plain that in a group where
the members are similarly umbellate and mostly white-flowered,
the plant-lover whose books consist mostly of pretty pictures,
perhaps running to several volumes and expensive, perhaps
grouped according to colour, is soon going to be in trouble. I
started off with H. G. Jameson’s Trees and Flowers of England
and Wales, with no plates but with thumb-nail sketches illustrat¬
ing the salient points in artificial keys, which encouraged accurate
observation of characters. This cost me the princely sum of 3s. 6d.
and I had little difficulty with the Urnbelliferae from my earliest
days. Our local Flora author, then, may give advice on literature
to the rawer of his helpers and thereby in the long run save

*lf tliere is only one specimen of any plant otliei- tlian of casual status,
it should not be collected l)y anyone.— Ed.

UNIVERSITY OF

LOCAL FLORAS

himself work. At the veiy beginning is a very good time, for the
prospect of being engaged on a definite project will often turn a
diffident worker into a keen one.

Having thus disposed of the preliminaries, what of the
difficulties inherent in the examination of the plants themselves,
assuming them to have been v/ell collected and preserved. These
are, broadly speaking, of two kinds : —

(a) Difficulties caused by the taxonomists who have dealt
with the group.

(b) Difficulties caused by the plants themselves.

The first is not necessarily inseparable from the second, nor is
it perhaps as rare as we would like to think. Anyone who has
tried to name his British Erophila, for instance, from Druce’s
synopsis of continental treatment applied to British material, or
from the continental treatments themselves, will know what I
mean. This problem will be bound up with the scope of a local
Flora and the desirable degree of splitting. In many groups the
treatment even in standard works such as C., T. & W. is not
altogether satisfactory. It is not uncommon, however, for a
referee who has named a plant for a correspondent to receive a
plaintive letter saying : “But it does not agree with the description
of this species given in . . . .” Or, where the treatment of a group
in a new Flora differs from that of an older one, the postage
stamp botanist who is unwilling to forego the pleasure of an extra
name on his list may try to persuade the referee to give the
name of a “split” by now known to be spurious. In the revised
B.S.B.I. Panel of Referees it will be indicated that although the
list is given in the order of “Dandy”, it must be pointed out that
the referee does not necessarily agree with the treatment of his
group in either Dandy or any other publication. This is necessary,
as botanists are now interested in plants, not names, and it is to
be expected that the current trend towards the sinking of worth¬
less species and varieties will continue for a while. WTiat then
of the referee who is recruited for a local Flora but whose views
differ radically from current taxonomic opinion as represented
by, for example, Clapham, Tutin and Warburg? Is the local
Flora the place for the description of new taxa or revisionar;^
work (e.g. the publication of Epipactis cleistogama C. Thomas in
the Flora of Gloucestershire)'] I would say emphatically not.
Even for the professional botanist who has a comprehensive library
at his disposal the descriptions of new taxa are already scattered
through too great a volume of literature for comfort, and it is
essential that novelties should appear in as limited a number of
publications as possible. Likewise, the literature is cluttered up
with quite enough double citations of the “in” and “ex” variety.
I would suggest that if any specialist proposes the publication of
a new treatment or a new taxon in a local Flora, the author should
politely decline to adopt these unless at least a preliminary account
appears in Watsonia.

PROBLEMS OF IDENTIFICATION

53

Now for the difficulties provided hy nature. It is sometimes
asked, “Are you a splitter or a lumper?” And sometimes, most
regrettably, this straight question receives a straight answer, thus
betraying a preconceived position and giving the lie to the scientific
integrity of the answerer. The only true answer is of course that
each case must be considered on its merit. Let us consider first
perhaps the most famous cause of critical groups, i.e., apomixis.
In the September (1961) issue of Taxon, G. D. Rowley has this to
say:

“Apomixis is just another means of vegetative propagation
of covering a wide area with the same genotype in a short
period of time. We do not make a special case of bracken,
because it can cover a whole hillside with one clone, or of
Dog’s Mercury because a woodland may be filled with a
single colony only. The species concept is debased by
giving a separate binomial to every apomict. Look at
the chaos it has caused in Rub us and Hieracium” .

So apomixis is just another form of vegetative reproduction,
giving binomials to whose exponents causes chaos. Yet one is
tempted to wonder whether the writer has spent as much time
on Rubus as did Watson when he denied the existence of the
“fabled swelter of intermediates”, or Edees who says in the paper
previously referred to that “the majority of Rubus spp. are clearly
defined” — which is as much as can be said for many non-apomictic
species. It appears to me that for the present the taxonomic chaos
resulting from the naming of distinct apomicts is much less than
that which would result from the lumping of morphologically and
ecologically separable plants such as Rubus ulmifolius and R.
vestitus, Hieracium exotericum and H. vulgatum, to use common
species as examples. If we are to say that because by normal
taxonomic treatment a group becomes highly involved, therefore
we must stop it becoming involved by altering our treatment,
rather than accepting the fact that nature is involved, we are
going to find ourselves in a decidedly queer position. Similarly, to
make such a generalisation we need to assume that the small
species of Rubus only reproduce apomictically, which is certainly
not the case with the two mentioned above. Likewise, although
we do not name clones of bracken, we certainly do in other groups
(e.g., Salix, Ulmus), and it is hard to see how this can be avoided.
Morphological differences between a tremendous number of
apomictic species may be greater than between many normally
sexually reproducing species; and until it is demonstrated that
one method of character fixation is more important than another,
it seems to me that the apomicts must receive recognition.

Another great cause of difficulty is of course the apparent lack
of genetic barriers which gives rise to frequent hybridisation. It
has been pungently observed that in many cases where lack of
genetic barriers has been claimed the real situation would appear
to be lack of species. But in Salix and Epilobium , for example,
such is not the case. I must agree witli what Dr. Peter Raven

54

LOCAL FLORAS

said to me recently, that botanists have developed such a phobia
about hj^bridisation in Epilohium that they are almost more ready
to believe that any one example is a hybrid than that it is a pure
species, and that in fact the frequency has been much exaggerated.
Many times I have been in spots where many species have been
present in abundance, but not seen a single convincing hybrid.
Nevertheless, they are reasonably frequent, and in this and other
such genera I believe that there is no room for opinion as to
whether they and their products, however involved, should fall
within the scope of a local Flora. They are real elements of the
floral population and must be included. It may be said that these
critical groups take up a lot of room, but against this I would
make these points:

(1) A local Flora must be a good one. If it is not, it were bet¬
ter not done at all. The days when a mere list of plants with a
single-name locality could be published under the pretentious
name of “Flora” are surely over. I say this even as a supporter
of the traditional type of Flora such as those of Gloucestershire
or Wiltshire.

(2) A Flora, unfortunately, has got to sell, or someone feels
the pinch — perhaps a publisher who will thus not venture on
such a commitment again. Since, as has been observed, most
serious interest in the British flora is now in these groups, I feel
that if anything they must be stressed at the expense of the more
straightforward groups if the Flora is to sell at all well.

I would like to touch on the vexed question of chromosome
number. There are, of course, two extreme views on the
significance of this in taxonomy, and they were expressed as
follows at the recent “Flora Europaea” round table conference in
Vienna, April 1-7, 1959.

(1) Askell Love — “Taxonomy and chromosomes — a reitera¬
tion”.

“The only logical rule for the classification of taxa differing in
chromosome number is to name them as distinct species”.

(2) Rothmaler — “Taxonomy and genetics”.

“Every single species is defined bv a certain number of
characteristics, including its area and ecological behaviour. In my
view it is quite inadmissible to accord any greater or deeper
importance to the characteristic chromosome structure or to
chromosome number. Not only the methods we apply, but the
facts, too, give proof that number and structure of the chromo¬
somes can vary as much within a species or subspecies as they can
remain constant within a big genus or even parts of families. For
this reason, I do make use of chromosome number as a valuable
aid to the definition of taxa and for their status but I cannot lend
it greater importance than I would give to any character of the
exterior or interior morpholog\^”.

PROBLEMS OF IDENTIFICATION

55

The latter is my position exactly. Love goes out of his way to
cite instances where “chromosome species” have been named in
the past by critical workers using traditional methods which had
revealed small morphological differences, and here the relevance
of this matter to local Floras is revealed, for an example which
he cites is Callitriche platycarpa Kiitz. This species is not included
in the current British Floras but has been distinguished in this
country by a least one specialist. The author of a local Flora will
have to make up his mind as to whether he will include species
which would scarcely receive recognition but for the “confirmatory
evidence” of chromosome number. Love’s statement may be con¬
ceded up to a point. But he does not convince because he does
not deal adequately, if at all, with firstly non-apomictic micro-
species which are distinct but have the same chromosome number
(cf. the work of Yeo on British Euphrasia), or secondly totally
different species with the same number as shown by the work of
Hambler on British Orobanche, where both species of section
Trionychon and six (possibly seven) of the section Osproleon were
found to have the same number. Thus I believe that there are a
great number of questions to be answered before taxonomists
launch into such a wholesale production of new combinations and
species as seemingly advocated by Love on chromosome number
alone. It is, of course, quite possible that the author of a local
Flora will have to consider unquestioned new taxa arising
subsequent to the publication of the current standard British
Flora, just as the two species of watercress, although perfectly
distinct, remained undistinguished for so many years. But where
a species receives recognition by only a minority of taxonomists
holding extreme views concerning the significance of chromosome
number, it seems advisable not to adopt it.

It mav be said that I have dealt with general principles rather
than with difficulties of identification at the local Flora level.
This has been quite deliberate. I do not believe that the author
of a local Flora can be a nonconformist. The local Flora bears, as
it were, the same relationship to a national Flora that a six-inch
Ordnance Survey map does to a one-inch map. The same broad
outline is there (though I believe that I have made it clear that
I do not intend here that the conformity should be to any ONF
national Flora throughout), but there is room for more detail :
and it is in detail that these concepts which have been dealt with
are shown in sharpest relief.

Lastly, a word on the casual alien. It is undeniable that there
IS a very considerable interest in these plants currently. Here the
difficulties are, of course, merely limitations of facilities and
knowledge of the literature. No one but the professional or the
amateur with access to a large herbarium will be able to do much
with them. As to their place in the local Flora, I believe that they
should be put in their traditional position — an appendix in small
type. They could be called “interestingly unimportant”, and I
cannot help but feel that although they have some few serious

56

LOCAL FLORAS

students, their main appeal is to the postage stamp botanist who
has run out of native plants. Wlien, of course, a plant is believed
to be permanent, and / or if it may be overlooked for a native
species — an incipient Epilohmim adenocciulon, perhaps — it is a
very different matter, and such a plant could be given equal
prominence with the denizens.

I have not dealt at length with ecological variation since,
where referees are employed, ecovars. will not often present great
difficulty to the man who has really worked at his group in the
field and experimentally — just as although Juncus bulbosus may
perpetrate the most absurd disguises which are confusing at first,
it rarely deceives anyone who knows it well.

References

Clapham, a. R., Tutin, T. G. & Warburg, E. F., 1952, Flora of the British
Isles. Cambridge.

Dandy, J. E., 1958, List of British Vascular Plants. London.

Druce, G. C., 1929, The British Erophila, Rep. Bot. Soc. & E.C., 9, 177-198.
Edees, E. S., 1959, The difficulties of a Ruhus referee, Proc. B.S.B.I., 3,
281-282.

Grose, [J.] D., 1957, Flora of Wiltshire. Devizes.

Rambler, D. J., 1958, Chromosome numbers in some members of the family
Orobanchaceae, Journ. Linn. Soc. (Bot), 55 (363), 772-777.
Jameson, H. G., 1937, Trees and flowers of England and Wales. London.
Love, Askell, 1960, Taxonomy and chromosomes — a reiteration in
Heywood, V. H. (ed.). Problems of Taxonomy and Distribution
in the European Flora, Fedde. Rep. Sp. Nov., 63, 192-211.
Riddelsdell, H. j., Hedley, G. W. & Price, W. R., 1948, Flora of Gloucester¬
shire. Cheltenham.

Rothmaler, W., 1960, Taxonomy and genetics, in Heywood, V. H. (ed.),
Problems of Taxonomy and Distribution in the European
Flora, Fedde. Rep. Sp. Nov., 63, 176-179.

Rowley, G. D., 1961, The naming of hybrids. Taxon, 10 (7), 211-212.
wSalmon, C. E., 1931, Flora of Surrey. London.

Watson, W. C. R., 1958, Handbook of the Rubi of Great Britain and Ireland.
Cambridge.

White, J. W., 1912, The Bristol Flora. Bristol,

Yeo, P. F., 1954, The cytology of British species of Euphrasia, Watsonia, 3,
101-108.

Discussion

Mr. E. L. Swann opened the discussion by saying: “We have listened
to a most interesting paper from a professional botanist on the problems
of identification. He compares a botanical referee to a similar gentleman
in a football game. I think that is putting too high a value on him, for
the football referee is not only in complete charge of the game but also
has the power to order a player off the field. Rather would I compare
him to the linesman who is occasionally consulted by the referee and this
gentleman may take his advice. The operative word is “may” for I am
probably one of those nonconformists the speaker frowns upon. For

PROBLEMS OF IDENTIFICATION

57

example, as a result of many years’ field-work with the willows, my
treatment of them would run somewhat differently from the usually
accepted opinions. My sympathy is with the referee, for far too often he
has such inadequate material on which to base his opinions. To know the
willows one has to live with them all the year round. You may recall
what the famous Norfolk salicologist, Sir J. E. Smith, said about them in
his English Flora, “No botanist can be competent to form an opinion
about them, unless he resides among the wild ones, for several seasons, or
continually observes them in a garden”. To this day Smith’s account of
this interesting but puzzling genus, after making allowance for his denial
of hybrids, remains one of the best. Again, in a recent book one of the
Cruciferae, Hirschfeldia incana, was enclosed in square brackets purport¬
ing to be one of the taxa occurring in the Channel Islands but not known
as an established member of the flora of the British Isles. 1 was reminded
of this only last Sunday when during the course of a ten-mile walk in
Breckland I was rarely ever out of sight of this plant and it has persisted
there for many years.

The speaker rightly stresses the fact that a county Flora is not the
place for descriptions of new taxa. Yet when the last Flora of Norfolk
was published in 1914 a reviewer deplored the omission of short descrip¬
tive or critical notes which often lend more than a local value to such
works and which indicate observation of a higher type than a mere
record conveys. I think that such critical notes are of importance for
visiting botanists to assist them in finding a plant’s name, for this testing
in the field of a local Flora is the merit of its worth.

In his emphasis on critical groups, the speaker said that they must be
stressed at the expense of others if the Flora is to sell at all well. I
wonder if critically-minded botanists constitute the largest group of
buyers. Rather would I think that the biggest sales would be to those
botanists, actual or potential, who, in the case of Norfolk, would want to
know just what plants they might expect in, say. our three classic habitats,
Breckland, the Broads, and the north Norfolk coast.

My experience with the genus Epilohium is different from the speaker’s.
My field-studies show that where two species grow together in some num¬
bers then a hybrid or two will usually be found. For example, in
marginal woodland where E. adenocaulon and E. montanum so frequently
grow together their hybrid will be found; in fact, it can usually be spotted
from a distance by reason of its characteristic hybrid vigour. We find
E. adenocaulon a powerful pollen parent in West Norfolk.

I am glad that there is a saving grace for the fashionable rubbish-tip
alien when it is found to be permanent. Visitors to the north Norfolk
heaths are amazed at the abundance of Acaena anserinifolia where it
arrived from a rubbish tip near Sheringham some forty years ago. Such
places can become centres of distribution.

We struggling amateurs are becoming so clamped down by the tyranny
of specialisation that I am tempted to point out that a species is not estab¬
lished by Divine Authority but represents only a group of organisms
which we put together for our purposes. If a species is so difficult to
recognise that only one expert can do it, its usefulness is lost, like a
language that only one man can speak. Similarly, if there are too many
intermediates between one potential species and its allies, convenience is

58

LOCAL FLORAS

lost. Let us, therefore, have species that any competent botanist can
differentiate”.

Dr. Walters said that he must agree with Mr. Swann that the species
should be a useful unit which any competent botanist can distinguish, but
he did not think that this necessarily clashed with what Mr. Townsend
had said.

Mr. Townsend replied that he believed that Mr. Swann in fact answered
his own question by observing earlier in his remarks that his knowledge
of the willows was based on many years’ experience and to get to know
them one had to live with them all the year round. This was the same
with all critical groups. It is rather like the difference between a simple
sum and a problem involving differential equations. Because the
mathematician takes longer to do the latter it does not mean that the
problem is less legitimate or the mathematician incompetent.

Mr. D. Allen said he had long felt that the referee system breaks down
in one or two cases, particularly with brambles and roses. The average
collector can do best by just collecting at random and sending the speci¬
mens into a central referee. He thought that in one or two cases it was
imperative that the compiler, or someone working on the Flora, should
specialise in difficult groups.

Mr. Philcox stated that he would like to support Mr. Townsend’s
request for abundant material for identification and he wished to add that
the referee must also be sent adequate data.

Professor Hawkes agreed with Mr. Allen that someone should make
themselves responsible for certain critical groups in the county and he
thought it essential for a Recorder in charge of a county Flora to have
at least some knowledge of such groups so that collections of the right
sort of material could be made. Without knowledge of these groups it
would be impossible to make collections of them since the eye normally
does not see variation of this type if such variation is previously unknown
to the observer.

Mr. Palmer wanted to know what one did when one got a discrepancy
between the opinions of two experts?

Someone replied that it may be the fault of the plant.

Mr. Townsend pointed out that one should be quite certain that the
referee had given a definite name. There had been cases where, in spite
of a referee making some qualifications, the correspondent had published
his record as a firm determination. This was strongly to be condemned.
Where two differing positive names had been given, his first remark that
Edees was right in stating that a referee’s first difficulty was his ignorance
of his group should be remembered. The two referees should be notified
of the discrepancy and left to sort it out between them — no doubt to
their mutual advantage.

Another .speaker suggested that in fairness to both experts, it is
advisable to inform each one that the other has received a similar
specimen.

Dr. Walters did not think Mr. Palmer should be upset about telling
the experts that they disagree over the same specimen. When he had
been involved in such a case he had found that a different opinion is
often of value to him.

Dr. Perring closed the discussion by pointing out that there are many
specimens which are wrongly named in many herbaria.

OLD RECORDS

59

OLD RECORDS

David McClintock

When I was asked last April if I would give this talk, I
protested that I knew no more about this subject than the man
next door. My only credentials are that I have been more or less
closely concerned with the projected Floras of Kent and of the
Channel Islands, particularly the latter. I shall draw my ex¬
amples chiefly from their three vice-counties. I take it that this
aspect of old records is merely part of the all-out effort that must
be made to assess correctly the identifications and status of the
plants in the area, and that ‘old’ records does not solely mean
very old ones.

The first task is to find the old records. There are very few
areas in Britain of any size which have not some sort of Flora or
list which provides a starting point. Many of these Floras,
excellent ones too, were written before most of us were born — the
vintage period, after all, ended over half-a-century ago, and the
rate of change since then has been far more rapid than ever
before. However, an existing Flora — or the records of the Maps
Scheme must be the obvious starting point. Then there are
standard works and periodicals which need searching; and if one
is lucky enough to come across copies of any of these works anno¬
tated by someone concerned with the area, this can prove useful.
Perhaps more might be done by discovering where the libraries
of former workers went to. It is also worth-while knowing who
has recorded plants, with or without making gatherings from the
area concerned. The chance specimen more than once has shown
that someone unsuspected had collected in the Channel Islands
and led to a search, or request, for his list or herbarium specimens.

In any event, the various herbaria which are likely to contain
specimens from one’s area, need looking through, and the next
best to seeing the plants actually growing is a correctly named,
localised and dated herbarium specimen — characteristics of by no
means all herbarium specimens ! In this, we now have the valu¬
able assistance of D. H. Kent’s recent book. Herbaria — public
and private — need searching not only for hidden records, but for
checking critical or dubious ones already in print, or otherwise
heard of. Even when doubtful ones are made by a redoubtable
recorder I have found that they are rarely supported by a speci¬
men. Mrs. Frances le Sueur keeps a card index for Channel
Island plants, and on it she notes the whereabouts of any
specimen we know of which has been collected in the Islands.
Thus we should know at once where to lay hands on sheets of

60

LOCAL FLORAS

any given plant which research makes critical, thus enabling the
old records to be correctly assigned. It is not only in the Cliannel
Islands that there is occasional doubt that a given specimen is
correctly labelled, but there the problem is probably somewhat
greater. The reason is that otherwise reliable gentry in the past
really did not know the difference between Jersey and Guernsey
and, when sent a specimen from one, were quite liable to label it
as coming from the other. We also, I suspect, suffer from visitors
(the Channel Islands have to rely largely on visitors for their
records) who dashed over, collected freely, and returned without
clear notes as to which island which plant had come from. Many
herbaria do not have their specimens arranged conveniently for
turning up the plants from any given vice-county. In the
Xatural Historv Museum, fortunately for the would-be compilers
of a Flora of the Channel Islands, their plants are almost in¬
variably on top of the folder. But whatever system is adopted,
a thorough search, is, I find, almost always rewarding. But it
does demand an immense expenditure of that scarce and
precious commodity, time.

It is important that all records, however ridiculous, that have
found their way into print, be accounted for. This is a bane for
compilers of local floras, but if one does not do so, someone is
sure to complain that this or that record has not been dealt with.
And when there is a published record, it is wise, as with all
quotations, to trace it back to its source, partly because errors
can crop up in copying, and partly because so often the original
source produces fresh information.

Then having found the records, there is the important pro¬
cess of assessing and checking them. This is automatically
liarder with old ones because the person who made them is most
unlikely to be still available, or usefully available, for questioning.
Identifying pre-Linnean Latin names of plants is a form of know¬
ledge for which most of us have to rely on the specialist, but they
are not infallible — Dr. Rose recently rewardinglv reinterpreted T.
Johnson’s two journeys in X. Kent. Old English names can be
very confusing. Only the other day I discovered that the same
word was used for Catmint, I.a vender and Turnip flowers.

In assessing records, one should try to get a line on the sort of
people their recorders were. There is the standard book bv
Britten and Boulger : and many existing Floras include short bio¬
graphies of their main contributors. But we must not be blinded
by a person’s subsequent reputation. In the Channel Islands
we have Quite a crop of unrepeated records made by the august
C. C. Babington himself, but the fact is that he was then young
and a long wav off being a professor. In any event, I must stress
that absolutelv anyone is liable to make a slip, and one must
never be put off by the eminence of the recorder into accepting
what otherwise seems improbable. And I mav say that this is
even harder when the eminent recorder is still alive.

OLD RECORDS

61

But even taking everything into account, there will still be
some records that appear startling and yet are true. Many sub¬
sequent Floras, or supplements, or check lists, provide examples
of plants that have been rejected and subsequently confirmed or
refound. Pity, therefore, the compiler of any Flora in trying to
know what to accept or reject.

In their accounts of each species, a great many Floras detail
the first record in the area, the first that is for ‘standard’ plants,
aliens being frequently and repeatedly considered unworthy of
this. Some differentiate between record and first mention, or first
evidence, or first found, or give the first record and not an earlier
specimen, and some give no reference to first records at all. These
fine distinctions I consider of no importance. What presumably
matters is the first reliable evidence, whether or not it happens to
have been published before. But first records any waj" — of garden
plants too — can be over-rated. You will find plenty of examples in
Floras of perfectly ordinary plants “first recorded” only in the last
century, whereas much scarcer plants were first recorded there
long before. Yet nobody seriously suggests that most of the
former are recent arrivals, whereas the rarities have been there all
that longer. If one is going to have first records, one should be
prepared also to have last records — and you will find in the check¬
list for Herm, that Mrs. le Sueur and I have included last records
as well as first, for plants which have not been seen recently. But
last records are harder to come by than first — those of you who
watch birds will have had this difficulty over the last of the
migrants to leave. No doubt many plants have had several intro¬
ductions, and it may not at all be the first one which successfully
established, or re-established the plant — if it is established. 1730
and 1817 are both given as the dates of introduction of Snowberrv
both are true, but it is said to have died out between the two
dates.

My remarks hitherto, have been largely confined to what I
take to have been the old restricted, rather cosy practice. I hasten
to say that recent floras show more freshness. For the rest of my
time I am going to make various suggestions for enlarging the
the scope of our assessment of records. Mark you, I am well aware
that much of what one gets this way may be little more than
clues, in particular because of the difficulty of being quite sure, of
the exact locality or of the precise plant, and much will relate to
obvious plants, notably trees. But it must help to be aware of
the countless factors which have affected our flora over the ages,
especially in the status of apparent newcomers. Indeed, it is the
apparent new-comers that have been far too rigorously rejected
and we suffer from the paucity of records for many of them.

I suppose geology must come first of the outside sources since,
after all, the surrounding and underlying rocks and soils can be of
literally basic importance to the flora. Dr. Rose has made success¬
ful forays by relating geology and plant distribution in Kent, for
example, with the Greater Horsetail and the Alternate-leaved

(32

LOCAL FLORAS

Golden Saxifrage ; and Ijy plotting the stations for Elms on maps,
Ricliens has shown where the distribution seems natural.

It is a moot point how far back we go with our searches.
Printed records begin little over four hundred years ago, a
trifling time compared with the vast period there have been
plants in our country. Have pre-Glacial records a place, except
as a curiosity, in local Floras? There will not be all that number
relevant to to-day’s local flora, but this background information
should be known. Palaeo-botany and fossils can shed light on
still-existing plants. A good example of this is the records of
seeds of Water Soldiers from the Eocene and later, since one of
the species from the Pleistocene is not distinguishable from the
one we have to-day. Here is an apparently native plant which is
now a shy fruiter, so might have been thought a recent introduc¬
tion.

Then we must have a reference to the remarkable results of
pollen analysis and allied techniques. These have told us, for
example, that many of our common weeds or trees, even which
were supposed to be comparatively recent introductions, have in
fact been with us far longer than was assumed until recently.

Then there is the changing climate of our Islands, at least over
the last two or three millenia, and particularly exceptionally cold
or dry or wet or warm years, since it is the extremes of climate
which most affect plants.

Certain animals need special country to live in, or crop, or
avoid certain plants, or insects need special ones for their eggs and
larvae. I expect you know the importance of Jays in disturbing
acorns; but after a recent broadcast an ornithologist sent me a
useful observation of them taking and spreading the bulbils of
Martagon lilies.

Ecology, plant ecology at any rate, is now the basis of some
modern Floras, but it needs applying to past ages as well. On Sark,
I suspect the natural climax on the tableland is a rough, bare
heathland — as the top of the neighbouring Brechou is to this day.
Documentary evidence from Tudor days, and much earlier, agrees
with this, but I would like an expert ecologist’s opinion as well,
since this supports my belief that few, if any, trees are native in
the Channel Islands, except perhaps in the valleys.

An expert botanist may be able to detect introgression or full
hybrid origin in a plant, and so deduce the past presence of a
now vanished or rare species, a fact calling for comment. In the
Channel Islands, Centaurea jacea in particular, is variously mixed
with C. nigra and C. nemoralis.

Despite the lack of unanimity between the experts on some of
the derivations, another source for records is place-names. Re¬
cently the Dame of Sark put me on to an old source which
showed Galingale as growing only in one field in the island, and
that it had given its name to that field. The patois name for
Galingale is Han, and this field for centuries has been known as
La Haniere, and that is the only place we know Galingale in Sark

OLD KECORDS

63

to-day. I shall suspect Galingale now or in the past if 1 eonie
across other Hanieres in the Channel Islands, since the patois
name is the same in Jersey and Guernsejo

Documents are a tantalising source, but may provide useful
clues such as where long-vanished buildings or villages used to be,
or merely with such simple phrases as an alder-grove. Some
Saxon charters refer to prominent boundary hedges and trees —
Mr. Grose has made use of these in his Flora of Wiltshhe. Re¬
cently, I came across what I suppose is a first record for any Mal¬
low in Kent. It occurred in a document dated November 1546,
connected with the Monastery attached to Canterbury Cathedral,
where the Prebendary was granted “ a way through the Gimews
to bring in wood” — and details allow this to be pretty closely
located. This word is connected with the French Guimauves, and
is likely to refer to Marsh Mallows which are larger and more
permanent, and which grow to the present day very close by.
Another religious, in effect documentary, source, but a rather un¬
satisfactory one, IS the foliage carved on pew-ends and on the
capitals of pillars — Dr. Druce wrote up the numerous examples in
Southwell Minster. Do not forget paintings and illuminations
and some of the lovingly, exquisitely depicted plants in them, for
it may be known where a given picture was painted. The Teasles
in Constable’s ‘Fiatford Mill’ are still there to this day, 150 years
after; and Samuel Palmer is an example of an artist who might
well help in Kent. Dr. Druce in the Flora of N orlhamptonsliire ,
showed how many first records are to be found in the poems of
John Clare, who made many first records of birds too, but in my
experience most poets are wildly out in their reference to flowers.
Do not use only old documents for old records — I learnt about
the history of the cultivation of Rape from the report of the
Annual Congress of Seed Crushers, held last year in Stockholm.
And such publications as Country Life, The Field, The Country¬
man, The Gardener’s Chronicle and many otliers can also usefully
put one on the alert.

Geography should be brought in. Those remarkable borings
made in the Broads during the last decade showed their artificial
origin, and at the same time named cpiite a number of plants,
which came up in the borings from lower levels. Another way in
which geography helps is in such matters as being aware of
natural processes or the changing coastline, or the altered courses
of rivers. I hope one day geographers will be able to explain to
me how sand plants could grow on Sark a hundred years ago,
since to-day there are no suitable localities and no sand except at
low tides, unless tins bunch of records has some other explanation.
Of course geography is taken into account in many Floras — for
example, in accounting for the vanished saline plants in Guernsey
from the days when the north part was, in effect, a separate
island; or knowing where old mills were. Economic geography
also can be important, say in recognising hammer ponds in the
Weald, or what were the trade routes and methods of transport.

6i

LOCAL FLORAS

a source for aliens from time immemorial.

To write a flora properly demands an acquaintance with his¬
tory and general knowledge to be aware who did roughly what at
what time, as well as some of the details. Charlemagne is said to
have encouraged the planting of House Leeks as a protection from
lightning, and he ordered Fennel to be grown on all the imperial
farms. Edward I reckoned to eat eight and a half pounds of
Fennel a month, and no doubt many others followed the examples
—or edicts — of these eminent people. The Romans, too, are said
to have been particularly fond of Fennel (and the Saxons of
Leeks), I read of an efligy of Henry III and in the hay with
which it was stuffed were found specimens of Pennycress. Per¬
il aps it is known who did this stuffing, and where.

Maybe the question of badges comes in, such as the white and
red roses of York and Lancaster, or the broom of the Plantage-
nets. This year, I was at the Lonach Gathering at Strathdon, rhe
oldest one in Scotland, where two of the clans traditionally march
to the Games gTound, one of them wearing in their bonnets,
broom, and the other white heather. I wonder to what extent
these badge plants were, or are, specially fostered ?

Perhaps this leads on to some of the magic and superstition
connected with plants and especially trees, sacred trees being
often solitary and venerated and recorded, and these beliefs go
back a very long time. David Allen knows very much more about
this subject than I. I hope the language of flowers is dead, but
the Mayor of Sandwich still carries a blackthorn staff in proces¬
sions; and there are special plants connected with churchyards
and graveyards.

Then there is the whole field of herbal history, herbs as
medicines in the days when there were no chemists and people
largely provided their own remedies, and herbs for kitchen pur¬
poses, to add sweetness to the person or food or dwellings of
our ancestors. Herbs were much grown in monasteries, and
when on the plan of one you see the word herbarium, the plants
in it will not be dried. Mints at any rate, were grown in great
variety — one reference runs “How many varieties there are. I
might as well try to count the sparks from Vulcan’s furnace below
Etna”. I imagine that at the Dissolution, many monastic herbs
found their way into other gardens and places. The close contact
between foreign and British monasteries certainly was reflected
in the plants that they introduced and grew. Tlie connection be¬
tween the Austin Friars and the paeony has been particularly
interestingly told. I shall not go into the fantastic hocus-pocus
connected with herbs. Rudj^ard Kipling wrote : “Everything green
that grew out of the mould was an excellent herb to our fathers
of old”, and perhaps this very fact of the numerous plants they

used, manv of which were virtuallv useless, but to which re-
* «

ferences are made nevertheless, should help us in tracing back the
history" of plants.

OLD RECORDS

65

Farming history is of great importance — the field systems,
the crops grown, the livestock kept, and how these varied from
time to time and place to place. There is not nearly enough con¬
tact between the botanist and the farmer, or horticulturalist,
which would help interpret so much. I remember recording on a
mapping card, Salad Burnet and Timothy as being planted, and a
colleague expressing amazement, unaware they were constituents
of leys. Then the Enclosures in England from the 15th Century
onwards, the clearances in Scotland in the early 19th century,
and when sheep began generally to be kept on the uplands had,
of course, important effects biologically. There is also the aspect
of the very impure seed used until comparatively recent times.
As late as the last century, hay-seed was normal for sowing lav/ns,
parks, etc., and often came from different parts of the country.
Large quantities of foreign grass and legume seeds are imported,
currently at the rate of some 15,000-20,000 tons a year, from all
over the world, most of these alien plants looking just like our
own natives, and this has been going on year after year for a long
time. I imagine that up to at least Saxon times, a pure crop of
corn would have been unknown. There is something in the para¬
dox that the w^eeds of old are the crops to-day, and the crops of
old are the weeds to-day. We know, and it was dramatically
illustrated by Tollund Man, that such plants as Oraches and
Goosefoots were used for normal consumption.

And do not forget the huge subject of horticulture, commercial
and private, flower-garden, vegetable garden and park, and what
was grown in gardens (and throwm out from them) at different
times, even such unattractive ones to us as Amaranths. If you
look at the copy in the Linnean Library of the 1759 edition of
Miller’s Gardeners Dictionary, you will find he describes thirteen
Amaranths (and they have been anotated by Linnaeus himself
with his own Latin names) and virtually all of them are dull and
weedy species.

And as in farming, there were different fashions as to W'hat
w as grown and what w^as appreciated. The Cornelian Cherry used
to be widely grown in orchards, partly for its pickled fruit. This
seems evidence of milder summers in the middle ages, because I
do not think it often fruits in this country. But it might account
for its place in lists of British “wdld” plants, although it is very
rare to see any tree nowadays looking in the least wdld.

But perhaps one of the largest influences on our countryside
dates from the 18th century and such immensely popular land¬
scape gardeners as Kent, Brown and Repton, and the search for
the picturesque generally. They altered the countryside in a
wholesale w'ay, planting trees of all sorts in their clumps or
avenues on many thousands of country estates — on one alone, a
hundred thousand trees were thus planted, many of whose descen¬
dants wall have survived or mingled with the existing vegetation.
These improvers imitated nature so successfully that we now often
take their plantings for the natural scene. We should, perhaps.

LOCAL FLORAS

a

investigate more closely and precisely wliat they planted on those
estates where it is known they operated. Our eyes, nowadays,
are generally so dulled by varying shades of modern subtopia that
we forget how verj^ little in this country really is natural at all.
As an example of a specific species, I found that Rivers, that well-
known Hertfordshire firm, a hundred years ago freely used ‘dhe
more vigorous kinds of Rosa sempervirens as an undergrowth in
their ‘wilderness’.” Sweet Briar was freely planted too. Hedges
became really widespread only in the last 200 years and they have
had, like walls, a great influence on the country-side in the arti¬
ficial habitats thereby pioduced, as well as no doubt affecting the
micro-climate of the fields themselves.

Beginning in the 17 th century, there was the craze for ever¬
greens, and in the 19th century, one for pineta and saliceta, and
then that remarkable fern craze in Britain. I often wonder how
much the spores from these ferns escaped and established them¬
selves in other places where they are now happily growing. Inci¬
dentally, I daresay one of the “stations” in which ferns were
found may be becoming a thing of the past as steam engines give
way to electric diesels — I refer to the fine tufts one sometimes
finds on the sides of platforms where these plants used to enjoy
the steam from the locomotives.

Nor was it only the 18th century- people who planted plants
in the wild wholesale — that rascal Robinson knew wildflowers well
and collected them, and made strenuous attempts to naturalise
the hardier herbaceous plants in hedgerows and woods. But
numerous, more or less enlightened land-owners, also thought this
a good thing, and that by-, for example planting odd cherries in
the middle of woods, they- were beautifying the landscape — and
so often thev were.

c

And while we are talking of enlightened land-owners, we might
mention the effects of sport — some plants, excellently- established
in our woods, were put down for game covert, or sown in pheasant
mixtures. Many- of our woods are valued, or planted, as fox
coverts; and on the moors, their management, and in particular
the practice of muirburn, makes a huge difference to what grows
there.

A field that might repay- investigation is that of railway- em¬
bankments and cuttings. I was told some time ago that the
archives of manv railwavs do still show what was intentionallv
planted, and it would be a great ser\-ice if someone disinteiTed
these facts and summarised them. I got a new line on this in a
recent letter, after a broadcast, when I was told it was the prac¬
tice of seed-merchants to sell their tailings to the railways to sow
on the banks to stabilise them. The activities of the Roads
Beautify-ing Association should also be looked into in assessing
records from roadsides — which, in my- experience, may- mis¬
leadingly be described as “far from houses”.

But people have been, and are, planting plants and sowing
seeds widelv all the time, as some of vou mav have seen in the

«■ «■ t.

OLD RECORDS

67

letter in The Times early this year, saying how Samuel Butler
wished that “people would more generally bring back the seed of
nice plants and introduce them broadcast, sowing them by our
waysides and in our fields”.

I have not yet referred to forestry, wliich is of course a potent
influence in affecting plants in any area, both in what it brings in
and what the trees suppress and their other ecological effects.
This subject can be carried back a long way, for example by
examining charcoal or by reviving Roman wood to ascertain the
species. History does not relate how he harvested the subsequent
trees. I often wonder as I see False Acacia trees around the
country how man3^ of them owe their origin to Cobbett’s
strenuous advocacy of what he called the Locust. All this, and
much more, does show how careful we should be in arguing “it
could not have been planted there”.

Finally, I would recommend to you the pub as a fallible, but
still useful, source of information on old records ; and also the re¬
collections of people who do not visit pubs. I know what old
people’s memories can be like, but nevertheless, on occasions they
do help. In Jersey, we recently got the first record for Oxalis
tetraphylla from someone who used to collect it and give it to
her school colleagues as four-leaved clover to bring them luck in
exams.

Well, there are a few thoughts. These sources many not un¬
earth many old records for a local Flora, or unfailingly provide in¬
formation relevant to present-day distribution. But I suggest
that these wider aspects, which in greater or lesser degree have
already been used, should help get the feel — Gefiihl ist Alles, as
Goethe said and the framework into which to fit the old records
we collect and to judge tliem. One problem which such a wider
approach might clarify is that of some Thornapples. There was
a startling recent example near my home in Kent. The new
landlord of the Chequers, at Crouch, took over some ground in
Mereworth Wood which had not been tilled for a generation, and
perhaps never. He sowed potatoes, and in the first year the plot
was thick with Thornapples, and they still persist there. This
is no new puzzle, but surely local histoi^’' and experimental
botany at least could suggest the explanation of where these
Thornapples came from.

Perhaps our Society might sponsor an Economic and Social
Historv of the British Flora. And certainlv there must be a
great many apt references awaiting the light of day which would
illuminate or add to our old records, and give clues also for mak¬
ing fresh finds. Our Floras must be as accurate as full research
like this makes possible, and this calls for a great deal of hard
and unpaid work. But they do also need the spark of life and the
stamp of their author’s personality — and I suggest that the more
sources he uses, the more likely he is to achieve this.

68

LOCAL FLORAS

References

Britten, J. & Boulger, G. S., 1931, A Biographical Index of Deceased
British and Irish Botanists. Edition 2.

Cachemaille, — , 1874, History of Sark, Guernsey Magazine.

Chandler, M. E. J., 1923, The geological history of the genus Stratiotes,
Quart. J. Geol. Soc. 11, 117-138.

Grose, D., 1957, Flora of Wiltshire. Devizes.

Hunt, P., 1961, Letter in The Times, of April 25.

Kent, D. H., 1958, British Herbaria. London.

Le Sueur, F. and McClintock, D., 1961, A check list of the flowering
plants of Herm and its off islets. Reprinted from Rep. &
Trans. Soc. Guernesiase, 17, 36-48.

Richens, 1958, Studies in Ulrnus H, Forestry, 31, 132.

- , 1959, Studies in Ulmus, HI, Ibid, 32, 138.

- , 1961, Studies in Ulmus, IV, Ibid, 34, 47.

- , 1961, Studies in Ulmus V, Ibid, 34, 181.

Willis, Rev. R., 1868, Architectural history of the conventual building of
the monastry of Christ Church in Canterbury, Archaelogia
Cantiana, 7, p.l.

Discussion

Miss CoNOLLY, commenting on the contribution of pollen-analysis and
other disciplines of Quaternary research, mentioned first the recent work
by Miss Turner (of Cambridge) which shows how even a picture of
mediaeval farming systems may be revealed by detailed pollen analysis.
Secondly, she pointed out the need to distinguish between “records” based
on pollen and on macroscopic remains. For pollen could be either of
‘local’ or of ‘non-local’ origin, the latter moreover including a certain
proportion from ‘long-distances’. As the distinction (of this last), even
when possible, calls for special techniques it is not safe therefore without
confirmation to take a record based on pollen as a species record for
the immediate locality of the pollen sample. Moreover, determinations
from pollen are rarely possible at the species level. Macro¬
scopic finds on the other hand are of local origin, and more often
permit of specific determination. By and large the contribution here is
more in the realm of the History of the British Flora (Godwin, 1956) than
to vice-county or county-flora records.

As a warning, an example was given of the type of mis-identification
possible with old historic records : in an English translation of Apicus’
Art of Cooking, a diet of the poisonous ‘Black Bryony’ is prescribed. This
is because Pliny’s term tamnus is mistakenly assumed to refer to the
same plant as the Linnean Tamus.

The two names have been regarded as orthographic variants (Gilbert
Carter), but even so the plants cannot be assumed to be identical.

Mention too was made of the former extensive use of Holly, especially
in Derbyshire, as winter feed for sheep, and the suggestion by Radley that
few of the present pure stands of Holly near these villages may be natural.

OLD RECORDS

69

Mrs. Le Sueur said she was very puzzled by the present day appear¬
ance of Alderney and Sark as they present completely different pictures.
Alderney appears to be bleak, while Sark is lush, green and full of tall
trees. She had recently read an article which mentioned that until the
1830’s Alderney had been cultivated on the open field system and there
was one village containing all the inhabitants. From September to March
the cattle and sheep were allowed to graze all over the island. In March
fences were erected and parts of the island cultivated; the fences would
then be removed in September.

In 1565 Sark was given to Helier de Carteret by Elizabeth I. He
took with him farmers to settle the island. Each farmer was expected
to build his own house and cultivate the ground around that house. Hedges
were built round the fields. To-day Sark is covered by small fields with
huge hedges round them, whereas Alderney is quite open and bleak owing
to the different methods of cultivation.

Mr. Allen did not think botanists went through entomological literature
often enough. Plants were usually food for insects and he quoted an
example in the Isle of Man concerning the Butterbur Moth the records of
which suggested that the plant was not a recent arrival in the island.

Mr. T. A. W. Davis pointed out that a Butterbur Moth had been at¬
tracted to light at his house which was more than a mile from the nearest
site where Petasites hyhridus occurs, and where it is known to have been
introduced early in the present century. There was no Petasites fragans
nearer.

Mr. McClintock stated that it should also be borne in mind that
insects would eat in captivity what they would not eat in the wild.

References

Godwin, H., 1956, History of the British Flora. Cambridge.

Flower, Barbara & Elisabeth Rosenbaum, 1958, The Roman Cookery
Book, a translation of The Art of Cooking hy Apicius.
Gilbert-Carter, H., 1955, Glossary of the British Flora. Edition 2.

Radley, Jeffrey, 1961, Holly as Winter Feed, Agr. Hist. Rev. 2, p. 89-92.

70

LOCAL FLORAS

A NEW COMITAL FLORA?

Douglas H. Kent

Introduction

The system of recording British plants by vice-counties was
created by H. C. Watson in 1852, and brought into full use in his
Topographical Botany, published in 1873-1874.

In this monumental work, 1,428 phanerogams and vascular
cryptograms were listed in Bentham and Hooker order, and
under each species were given the vice-counties in which the
plant had been found, together with the authorities for the
various records. The authorities accepted by Watson were her¬
barium material, local catalogues marked by his correspondents,
personal observation, MS notes sent by correspondents and
published literature. Critical comments on the intrinsic value of
these authorities are provided by Lousley (1951b).

Watson was fortunate in having a large circle of correspon¬
dents to assist him in his compilation, but the gigantic task of
creating order out of a vast assortment of marked catalogues,
stray MS. notes and herbarium specimens should never be under¬
estimated.

A second, enlarged edition of Topographical Botany w’as
published in 1883, under the editorship of J. G. Baker and W. W.
Newbould. A Supplement appeared in 1905, and a Second
Supplement was published in 1929-30.

George Claridge Druce’s Comital Flora of the British Isles was
published posthumously in March 1932, and listed 1,767 phane¬
rogams, vascular cryptogams and charoph\des. The work also
embraced Ireland and the Channel Islands — areas excluded by
Watson.

The Coniital Flora, though compiled on somewhat similar
lines to Topographical Botany, omitted authorities for records,
except in the case of certain rare species seen by Dnice — here
the appropriate vice-county number was followed by an exclam¬
ation mark Tlie omission of authorities for the various records
undoubtedly saved considerable expense both in paper and in
print, but it makes the checking of a doubtful record extremely
difficult, and often impossible. It would have been most
useful if the manuscript of Comital Flora had been marked with
the necessarA" authorities and preserved for posterity. Un¬
fortunately, the manuscript of the work consisted of a ledger con¬
taining a cut copy of Topographical Botany with additional vice¬
counties annotated by Druce. It is regrettable, also, that the
present whereabouts of this volume is not certainly known.

A NEW COMITAL FLORA?

71

Watson confined the main part of his book to the scientific
names of plants, the vice-counties in which they were found, and
the authorities on which tlie records were made. Druce, on the
other hand, gave considerable additional data, including
synonymy, common names of plants, types of distribution,
status, details of habitats, frequency, British distribution, an out¬
line of extra-world distribution, and dates and details of sup¬
posed first British records. To accurately provide so much
information in a book of just over 400 pages was quite impos¬
sible and, consequently, much of the data was unreliable, and
some considerably outdated, even at the time of publication.

The Comital Flora was received with acclamation by the ar¬
dent followers of Dr. Druce, but some reviewers were less kind.
Pugsley, in the Journal of Botany, criticised the absence of
authorities for the records, and questioned “v/hether a simple
continuation of Watson’s original w’ork, accurately brought up to
date, would not have been preferable”. Praeger, in the Irish
Naturalists^ Journal, was incensed at the erratic treatment of
Irish species, and claimed that 150 or 160, or 12% of the total
species given for Ireland needed emendation. This criticism was
wholly justified, but the position has, fortunately, been largely
remedied by a list of additions and corrections given by Webb
(1952).

Other criticisms were levelled at the inconsistency in the
treatment of microspecies, and the erratic and often invalid
nomenclature used throughout the book.

One must bear in mind, however, Druce’s autocratic views
on nomenclature, and his advanced age when he undertook,
virtually alone, the compilation of what was to be his last work.

The fact remains, that despite its shortcomings. The Comital
Flora was basically a most useful work on the phytogeography
of these islands, and although long out of print, it is still eagerly
sought by students of the British flora.

A New Comital Flora?

We come now to a vital question — in view of the forth¬
coming publication of the ‘Atlas’ in the new year, do we really
need a new Comital Flora ? I think that we do — providing that
the work is presented in the form of a simple check-list, omitting
all the supplementary^ data introduced by Druce in the original
edition. Tliis would ensure that production costs would be kept
to a minimum.

It will scarcely be possible to botanize with the ‘Atlas’ in one’s
pocket, but it should be so with a new Comital Flora — and who
has not experienced the thrill of turning the pages of the original
volume to see if an interesting find is also a new vice-county
record? It must be emphasized that the suggested new edition
is not intended in any way to compete with the ‘Atlas’, indeed,
much of the information provided in it would emanate from the

72

LOCAL FLORAS

Distribution Maps Scheme files. The ‘Atlas’ may be regarded as
an invaluable work of reference, while a new Comital Flora may
be perhaps considered as a useful item of field equipment.

Since the publication of Druce’s w^ork in 1932, many
thousands of additional records have been added to the official
annotated copy of the book belonging to the Society, and at
least twelve papers dealing with emendations and additions to
individual vice-counties have been printed in the Society’s perio¬
dicals. On these grounds alone, there is good reason for
considering the printing of a new edition, and it has for some
years been the wish of the Society to implement such publication
— in fact, the proposal was first made at a meeting as long ago
as November 1938 and, but for the War and its aftermath, we
might now be discussing a third edition. Recently, the Publi¬
cations Committee reconsidered the matter and appointed a Sub-
Committee consisting of J. E. Lousley, F. H. Perring, P. J.
Wanstall and myself, to explore and investigate the means and
methods whereby the compilation of a new Comital Flora might
be undertaken.

1 . The Materials Available

Materials available for the preparation of a new work include
the vast resources of the Distribution Maps Scheme, the Society’s
annotated copy of the original work, and personal annotated
copies of the book belonging to J. E. Lousley and myself. In
addition, reference can be made to Topographical Botany and its
Supplemients, and to cover Wales we have Hyde and Wade’s
Welsh Floivering Plants, and for Ireland, Praeger’s Irish Topo¬
graphical Botany and its Supplements.

These, with a certain amount of other literary research,
particularly on Scottish periodicals, and examination of her¬
barium material should form an ample basis.

2. Vice-Counties, or Grid-Squares

Many problems have to be solved before a start can be made,
not the least of these are the units or areas in which the plants
are to be recorded.

For nearly a century, the vice-county system has held sway,
but with the advent of the Distribution Maps Scheme, and
doubtless before this, many botanists have felt that the Wat-
sonian method was outdated and needed revising on modern
lines.

The following schemes have been suggested : —

A. The retention of the Watsonian system.

B. A revision of the Watsonian system with vice-county
boundaries redrawn in accordance with existing county
boundaries.

A NEW COMITAL FLORA?

73

C. A revision of the Watsonian system with vice-county
boundaries redrawn along 10 kilometre square lines of
the National Grid. The county which already claims
the largest portion of the square taking the whole.

D. Abolition of the Watsonian system and the division of
the British Isles into groups of 25 10-kilometre squares
— this would provide about 140 divisions of equal area.

I should like, now, to discuss the advantages and dis¬
advantages of the various systems as I see them, and if I persis¬
tently use vice-county 21, Middlesex, as an example, I must crave
your indulgence, for it is the vice-county with which I am most
familiar.

A. As several speakers mentioned, the Watsonian system
has been in practical use for many years and has
worked remarkably well, it has been adopted also as a
means of scientific recording by bryologists, concholo-
gists, entomologists and zoologists. The cliief diffi¬
culties in the system consist of imprecise dividing lines
between vice-counties and changes in county boun¬
daries. J. E. Dandy, Keeper of Botany, British
Museum (Natural History), London, has already told
you of the series of large scale maps of the British Isles
he has prepared, showing the vice-county boundaries
and the changes which have taken place in the boun¬
daries of the counties since Watson’s time. These
maps are housed in the Department of Botany, British
Museum (Natural History) and are available for inspec¬
tion upon application to the Keeper. Indeed, an
excellent start on defining in detail the boundaries of
the Scottish vice-counties has been made by Ribbons
(1961) on data provided by J. E. Dandy. It must
again be emphasised that the boundaries laid down by
Watson in 1852 are permanent, and by strict adherence
to his system cannot be changed.

A furtlier weakness in the system is the great dif¬
ference in size of the vice-counties — from small ones
like Middlesex with 448,692 acres, to large ones, such
as Salop, with 861,809 acres, which makes statistical
analysis virtually impossible.

An added complication was Watson’s acceptance of a
single record as a voucher for each vice-county. This
failed to reveal the general distribution of species in the
vice-counties ; thus, to quote an example, by following
the methods adopted by some producers of distribu¬
tion maps, both v.c. 21, Middlesex, and v.c. 24,
Buckingham, would be totally blacked-in or shaded
for Gentianella gernianicn, yet in the first vice-county
it is known only from a single locality within 100 yards

74

LOCAL FLORAS

of the boundary with Hertfordshire, while in Bucking¬
hamshire it is locally abundant in numerous localities
in the Chilterns. Lousley (1951b) has pointed out that
the position is even worse in the case of plants depen¬
dent on special habitats, e.g., maritime and riverside
species.

Fortunately, this complication will be largely eradi¬
cated by the publication of the ‘Atlas’,

B, A revision of the Watsonian system with vice-county
boundaries redrawn in accordance with existing county
boundaries.

Undoubtedly the most important development
since Watson laid down his vice-county boundaries was
the creation of the Ccuntj^ of London in 1889. This
involved the merging of parts of W. Kent, Surrey, S.
Essex and Middlesex to form a new administrative
county. Other important changes in county boun¬
daries have taken place near large cities like IBirming-
ham, Bristol and Manchester. Numerous minor
changes in boundaries have also taken place in many
parts of Britain, and more, including some very im¬
portant ones, have been recommended by the Boun¬
daries Commission — even to the extent of merging some
small counties into their larger neighbours.

It seems that changes in county boundaries will
continue to take place indefiniteljL and in view of this
I can see little advantage in adopting the present-day
delimitations.

C. A revision of the Watsonian system with vice-county
boundaries redrawn along 10 kilometre square lines,
the county which already claims the largest portion
taking the whole, appears at first glance to be practical.
Brief study reveals that the scheme bristles with diffi¬
culties.

The western boundary of Middlesex, v.c. 21, is
based on the river Colne and its tributaries and is not
difficult to trace on a I" map — tlie suggested revision
would push this boundary westward to form an
imaginary line enclosing parts of Berkshire, v.c. 22,
Buckingham, v.c. 24, and Hertfordshire, v.c. 20. A
revision of the present northern boundary of Middle¬
sex, largely based on ancient earthworks — and
admittedly difficult to follow — would result in the
transfer to Hertfordshire of the only area of Middlesex
chalk of any importance, and the loss to the latter
county of Cardamine hidhifera, Blackstonia pei'foliata,
Ccdamintha ascend ens, Origaymm vidgare, Inula conyza,
Ophrys aptjera and Anacamptis pyranddalis. John
Blackstone would turn in his grave!

A NEW COMITAL FLORA?

75

The eastern boundary of Middlesex based on the old
course of the river Lea would be pushed eastward to
form an imaginary line running from Waltham Abbey
to Wanstead and West Ham, thus enclosing part of
South Essex, while the southern boundary, which
mainly follows the course of the Thames, would be ex¬
tended northwards in its eastern sector and southwards
in its western sector. Among the changes resulting
from this revision would be the transfer of the City of
London to Surrey, and the Royal Botanic Gardens,
Kew and part of Richmond Park to Middlesex.

This haphazard state of affairs would doubtless be
duplicated in many other vice-counties, and I do not
think that this scheme can be seriously considered.

D. Division of the British Isles into groups of 25 10-kilo¬
metre squares.

The main advantage of this method is that the
British Isles would be divided into about 140 squares
of more or less identical size. The chief difficulty, how¬
ever, is in ascertaining the purely artificial delimita¬
tions of a grid-system. The vice-counties have, in most
cases, rivers, hill ranges, valleys and roads as their
boundaries — grid-lines are less easily traced, and often
can be precisely located only with the aid of a map of
a fairly large scale. This is particularly so in areas of
heath and moorland where salient features needed to
pin-point a boundary are absent.

To sum up, I feel that only the first and the last of the four
schemes are acceptable for further consideration, and on both
historical and practical grounds, I am strongly in favour of re¬
taining the Watsonian system,

3. The Plants to be Included

The next step is to decide which taxa are to be included in a
new Comital Flora.

Watson was extremely careful in the selection of plants for
inclusion in Topographical Botany — though even he omitted
Cardaria draha and Senecio sqiialidus as mere casuals — despite
the fact that when his work was published, the former species
was known to be established in at least ten vice-counties, and the
latter in five.

Druce was less selective in his choice of plants for Comital
Flora, and the inclusion of such species as Vida tenuijolia, Poten-
tilla norvegica, Jasione perennis and Echinochloa crus-galli
appears to be of little scientific value. Both Watson and Druce
received adverse criticism on their selection of microspecies, but
no doubt the compilers of any future work will also offend in this
respect.

76

LOCAL FLORAS

Dandy (1958), lists 2,137 orthodox species, of which 1,511 are
native and 626 of alien origin; in addition, he gives 73 subspecies
and 685 microspecies, making a total of 2,895. If hybrids are to
be taken into consideration, we must add a further 538, making
a grand total of 3,433 taxa. This is almost double the total
number of plants included by Druce in the Comital Flora, and
it is obviously impracticable to include so many taxa in a new
edition.

The Distribution Maps Scheme, on the other hand, are in¬
cluding in the ‘Atlas’ approximately 1,695 orthodox species, of
which 1,449 are native and 246 of alien origin, about 50 sub¬
species, 360 microspecies and 32 hybrids, making a total of 2,107
taxa.

It would appear, therefore, that careful balance must be made
between the taxa listed by Dandy and those mapped for the
‘Atlas’. At a suitable time this problem will probably be re¬
ferred to a select Sub-Committee, in the meantime a few general
suggestions and comments may not be out of place.

Native Species. All orthodox native species, including those
which are extinct, should be included.

Alien Species. Alien species known to be established in, say
upwards of ten localities, should be included. In addition, certain
casual species showing a marked increase in occurrence in recent
years should be treated so that their future spread and possible
establishment may be followed. It is well to remember that such
well-known plants as Montia perfoUata, Galinsoga parviflora,
Crepis vesicaria subsp. taraxacifolia and Veronica filiformis were
at one time regarded as mere casuals of local occurrence. Recent
spreads of this type which come to mind and which need careful
recording are Bromus laciniatus in the London Area and else¬
where, and Amsinckia menziesii as a weed of cultivated ground
in East Anglia.

Alternatively, there seems to be little purpose in listing such
common sporadics as Lepidium sativum, Centaurea diluta,
Phalaris canariensis and Setaria italica which are found on most
municipal rubbish-tips, but rarely in other habitats.

Planted trees which are not known to regenerate in Britain
are also best excluded.

Subspecies. Those subspecies which show marked patterns of
geographical distribution differing from the typical subspecies,
e.g. Stellaria nemorum subsp. glochidisperma. Ranunculus
jlammula subsp. scoticus, Veronica spicata subsp. hyhrida and
Gentianella amarella subsp. septentrionalis, should I think, be
treated.

Certain other subspecies which fail to show patterns of geo¬
graphical distribution different from the typical subspecies, and
which are often found growing with, or near them, e.g. Galium

A NEW COMITAL FLORA?

77

palustre subsp. elongatum and Spargmiiuyn erectu'rii subsp.
neglectum, are perhaps best omitted.

Microspecies. There has been a considerable advance in the
studj^ of critical groups in the last twenty years, and revisions of
Rubus, Alchemilla, Thymus and Hiemcium have been published.
It should not be difficult to provide data for inclusion, though
necessarily incomplete, if so desired.

Hybrids. It is probably desirable to treat such well-known
hybrids as Geum x. intermedium, Stachys x mnhigua, and
others, particularly in the genus Salix. Hybrids rarely reported,
or known only from a few localities are perhaps best excluded.

4. The Status of the Plants

Many British plants which are native in certain vice-counties
occur outside their native range as established adventives in
other vice-counties, thus Lepidhim latifolium, a native of salt-
marshes round our coasts, grows abundantly as an alien in parts
of the Colne valley in Middlesex and Hertfordshire, while Ver-
bascum virgatum, a native of south-west England, grows as an
established alien at Hounslow, Middlesex. Likewise, Clematis
vitalba, native in Middlesex, is found as a naturalised adventive
in a number of Scottish vice-counties.

Watson indicated vice-counties in which a species occurred as
an introduction by placing them within round brackets at the end
of the native list. Druce adopted square brackets, and in his
introduction to Comital Flora wrote “The vice-counties in which
the plant is supposed to be native are unbracketted, but when
there is doubt of the nativity or of its identification, the records
are enclosed in brackets”. This is misleading, for we have here,
not only records of adventive occurrences but also of errors. To
complicate matters even more, native species which have become
extinct in certain vice-counties, also find their way into brackets,
e.g., under Pulsatilla vulgaris we read “Extinct 23, 28, 37” — the
whole entrv^ being enclosed within brackets. The same method is
used for Corrigiola litoralis, and doubtless for other plants. This
again is inconsistent and misleading, for one could assume that
the species were in fact formerly adventive in the vice-counties in
which they had now become extinct

A series of brackets can appear unsightly in print, and I would
suggest could be suitably replaced by the prefixing of the well-
known dagger sign to the appropriate vice-county numbers in
which a particular species occurs, or has occurred, as an
established alien.

5. Authorities for Records

As mentioned previously, Watson set very high standards
with regard to the authorities for his records. Druce was less
fastidious.

78

LOCAL FLORAS

The following are suggestions as to authorities which may be
considered acceptable in a new edition of Comital Flora.

A. Herbarium specimens.

B. Printed records from reliable sources.

C. Record cards from the Distribution Maps Scheme files.

D. Personal observation from reliable sources.

6. Dating the Records

One of the chief difficulties encountered in using Comital Flora
is that very few of the records are dated. Indeed, Druce, in the
Introduction to the work, states that “even of those species duly
recorded, many rest on very old authority”. A perusal of the
pages of the book readily bear out Druce’s words. Cochlearia
anglica, Samolus valerandi, Scirpus cespitosus, Blysmus com-
pressus and Juniperus communis are all shown as occurring in
Middlesex, yet the first and second were last recorded in 1869, the
third in 1737, the fourth in 1800 and the fifth in 1763, and all have
undoubtedly been long extinct in the county.

Information of this t3"pe is of little use to the student of plant
geographj^, attempting to map the present vice-comital distribu¬
tion of a plant — though again this defect will be partially remedied
by the appearance of the ‘Atlas’.

It is, however, important that in a new edition of Comital
Flora, some effort should be made to place the records in cate¬
gories according to the dates in which thej^ were made : thus, a
vice-countj" number printed in italic type would indicate that a
record was made before 1 900 ) ordinary Roman type would reveal
that a record was made between 1900 and 1940; heavy type
would show that a record was made after 1940. Wliere a species
is known to be extinct in a particular vice-county, the v.c. number
could be followed b^^ a capital E,

Though b\^ no means perfect, this method would at least be an
improvement on the existing system.

7. Errors and Doubtful Records

The problem of doubtful and erroneous records is perplexing.
It ma^^ be well to exclude them entirely, but my impression is
like that expressed b^^ D. McClintock , that if this were done, they
would, from time to time, be exhumed and reprinted.

I have given the matter a good deal of thought, but regret
that I am \inable to offer anj" really practical method of dealing
with this difficult group, other than to suggest placing them in
an appendix at the end of the work.

8. The Procedure to be Adopted

The procedure to be adopted in a new compilation would, of
course, be a matter for the Publications Committee, but I should
like to offer a few suggestions.

A NEW COMITAL FLORA?

79

Possibly the first step would be to set up a special Regional
Committee to deal with queries — and they will be numerous.

A series of record sheets, hereafter referred to as “master-
sheets”, ruled into seven columns, could be prepared, the columns
being headed in the following order ; — vice-county or grid-square
number, pre-1900. Authority, 1900-1940, Authority, post- 1940,
Authority. The first column could then be completed longi¬
tudinally with vice-county numbers from 0 to 112 and HI to H40,
or alternative grid-square numbers. One or more of these “master-
sheets” would be used for each plant included, the name of the
taxon concerned being placed at the head of the sheet or sheets.

The first annotations should, I feel, be made from the data
accumulated by the Distribution Maps Scheme, additions from
other sources being added later. It w^ould be most useful, also, if
records based on material housed in the larger National Herbaria
could be added. This w^ould necessitate the assistance of a num¬
ber of able volunteers, but w’ould greatly enhance the value of
the records.

The work of annotating the “master-sheets” could be carried
out in Families, or w4iere they are unduly large, as in Legummosae
and Compositae, in sets of Genera. As each w^as completed, drafts
could be prepared with an Appendix of queries and doubtful re¬
cords. These could be circulated to the Regional Committee, the
members of which could attempt to settle the queries for their
respective areas.

With the queries finally settled, the work of preparing the
typescript could be undertaken. The project w^ould probably
take upwards of three years to complete, but the result would be
most rewarding.

Finally, I would suggest that the completed “master-sheets”
should be offered for safe-keeping to the British Museum (Natural
History), London, wLere they could be made available for in¬
spection. Thus, no longer would w^e be plagued with interesting,
but obscure records, the validity of which it is impossible to as¬
certain.

Ackowledgments

I am greatly indebted to J. G. Dony, J. E. Lousley, F. H. Perring and
P. J. Wanstall for many of the suggestions incorporated in this paper, as
well as much interesting discussion on the subject.

References

Bennett, A., 1905, Supplement to “Topographical Botany”, ed. 2, suppl.
J. Bot., 43. Pp. 118.

- , Salmon, C. E. & Matthews, J. R., 1929-1930, Second Supplement to

Watson’s Topographical Botany, suppl. J. Bot., 67 & 68. Pp. 99.
Dandy, J. E., 1951, The Watsonian vice-county system, in Lousley, J. E.

(Editor), The Study of the Distribution of British Plants, 23-29.
■ - , 1958, List of British Vascular Plants, Pp. xvi H 17G. London.

80

LOCAL FLORAS

Druce, G. C., 1932, The Comital Flora of the British Isles. Pp. xxxii + 407.
Arbroath.

Hyde, H. A. & Wade, A. E., 1957, Welsh Flowering Plants. Ed. 2. Revised
by A. E. Wade. Pp. 209. Cardiff.

Lousley, J. E. (Editor), 1951, The Study of the Distribution of British
Plants. Pp. 128. London.

- , 1951b, The Watsonian vice-county system in practice, in Lousley,

J. E. (Editor), The Study of the Distribution of British Plants,
30-42.

Praeger, R. L., 1901, Irish Topographical Botany, Proc. Roy. Irish Acad.,
Ser. 3, V. 7. Pp. clxxxviii — 410.

- , 1906, Irish Topographical Botany, Supplement, 1901-1905, Proc.

Roy. Irish Acad., 26B, 13-45.

- , 1929, Irish Topographical Botany, Supplement, 1906-1928, Proc.

Roy. Irish Acad., 39B, 57-78.

- , 1933, Druce’s Comital Flora, Irish Nat. J., 4, 176-177.

- , 1934, Irish Topographical Botany, 3rd Supplement, Proc. Roy.

Irish Acad., 42B, 55-86.

Ribbons, B. W., 1961, The boundaries of the vice-counties in Scotland,
Glasgow Nat., 18, 160-168.

Watson, H. C., 1873-1874, Topographical Botany. 2 vols. Pp. 740. Thames
Ditton. Edition 2, corrected and enlarged [by J. G. Baker &
W. W. Newbould]. Pp. xlvii 4- 612. London. 1883.

Webb, D. A., 1952, Irish plant records, Watsonia, 2, 217-236.

Discussion

Mr. A. W. Westrup opened the discussion by asking which plants are to
be regarded as truly native and which as introduced. He pointed out that
some known introductions, e.g. Sycamore, occurred before most of our
ancestors themselves had arrived and so were as good natives as ourselves.
Others, whose remains were known in interglacial deposits, had probably
died out in most of their locations and their presence to-day was the result
of recent introductions. Most of our plants, especially the weed species,
were continually being exposed to new genetical material from plants
derived from introduced seed and so ‘native’ strains of many could no
longer be said to exist. He suggested that reliable records really date back
no further than Tudor and Stuart times.

He said he was undertaking the inclusion of doubtful records for the
Flora of Hampshire. The difficulty was that what one person accepted
another rejected wholeheartedly. He suggested that doubtful records
should not be put into an appendix at the end of a Flora but in brackets.

Mr. Kent reminded Mr. Westrup that he did suggest that he would
include in a new Comital Flora all orthodox native plants and aliens
established in ten localities and upwards. He did not like brackets as there
was a tendency to throw everything doubtful into them.

Mr. Westrup explained that he was not suggesting that established
aliens be omitted, but he thought that the status of these plants should be
made clear in the Comital Flora.

A NEW COMITAL FLORA?

81

Dr. Peering said they had been collecting doubtful records as a part
of the work for the Maps Scheme and in certain cases old errors had
turned out to be perfectly good records. For example there were many
doubtful records in the south of England for Parnassia and they got a
strong impression that it was in these counties after putting all the errors
together. When using a Flora one found tucked away in the back the
‘errata’, but one used the Flora without referring to the errata. He said
it would be useful if someone could go through all the literature and put
the ‘errata’ onto cards.

Mr. David pointed out that square brackets are an accepted form for
‘omit’ so should not errors go into square brackets and doubtful records
into brackets?

Dr. Dony thought Mr. Kent’s paper had been one of the most important.
He asked to return to the question of the limits of the county and wondered
what would be done if the county boundaries were taken as they are
laid down now, and then considered again in a few years time when they
would not he shown on the new maps. He pointed out that there had
been many changes in the past— he had had to consider ten of these in
Bedfordshire and every one was made in 1890. If the country is taken as
a whole it will be found that there have been no changes since 1890. He
thought that it may be possible to hope that after the Boundaries Com.-
mission had done their worst, counties might remain constant for seventy
years or so.

Professor Hawkes said that each time a county boundary was revised
it was supposed to be for the last time. He suggested that we should keep
the boundaries we had rather than go on to something else.

He wished to return to the question as to whether a Comital Flora
is necessary at all. A new Comital Flora might be of value in county
Flora revisions, but there seemed to be no doubt that we shall come to rely
more and more on the 10 km. Maps Scheme survey and shall find that the
division of our data on a county basis assumed much less significance once
the Distribution Atlas had been published. Most county Floras are also
being prepared with the records arranged according to the National Grid
and recorders can also obtain data from the Maps Scheme for their counties
as Dr. Perring had already informed us.

We should therefore discuss this problem in the light of what would be
most advantageous for the future, and what other projects or recording
schemes might lead on from, or link to, the Distribution Maps Scheme, to
see whether the time and effort spent on a new Comital Flora would really
be justified.

82

LOCAL FLORAS

CUTTING THE COSTS

R. W. David

As a preface to what I have to say on “cutting tlie costs”, 1
must make two points. Tlie first is that I am speaking, not as
any kind of botanist, nor as the potential contributor to a
local Flora, but as a publisher. If I succeed in suggesting any
possible economies, they may still not be acceptable to you, on
the grounds that they would too far diminish either the clearness
of presentation or the scientific accuracy of the Flora for which you
are responsible. Any such considerations I have left aside; for
my job, I take it, is merely to point out those areas in which
economies can in fact be made, and those others in which
economies are not a practical possibility or would be so small in
effect that it is a waste of effort to seek them.

My second introductory point is that I am well aware — and
even more so after listening to the previous discussions — that
what I have to say will be extremely obvious and elementary to
many of you. My advice is of the tritest, my examples of good
and bad practice perhaps too staringly black and white. I don't
regret this. It has been my experience as a publisher that it is
impossible to state the basic principles too simply or too often,
and that even the most conscientious and knowledgeable author
is frequently unaware how fatally easy it is to run up an
enormous printer’s bill, quite unnecessarily and without knowing
what one is doing. In stating the principles again I propose to
be extremely short, so as to leave time to develop in discussion
any particular leads that you may think worth pursuing,

“Publication” comprises three operations: editorial, that is
the preparation of the manuscript or typescript that is to serve as
what the printer calls his “copy” ; production — the processes of
printing and binding; and distribution, namely the getting of
the finished books out of the warehouse and into the hands of
potential readers. In each of these operations economies are
possible.

First, editorial. The chief enemj’ of economy is perfection.
x4n author or compiler, if he is not positively to inflate his costs,
must be content to draw the line at some stage, refusing to admit
any additional material that may come in thereafter, and pre¬
senting to the printer a final, complete and tidy manuscript. All
three qualities are vital in printers’ copy, for a twofold reason. A
book is an extremely complicated article made up of hundreds of
intricately interlocking elements. Interference wdth any one of
these may throw out all the others. I will illustrate both these

CUTTING THE COSTS

83

factors. Luckily for the publishers of CTW, Diapensia was dis¬
covered in Britain after printing of the Flora was largely com¬
pleted. A few months earlier and it would have been difficult to
resist pressure from the authors for its insertion. This would
have meant cutting every page in half from Ericaceae onwards
and re-soldering the halves, correcting every page number, re¬
numbering orders and families, altering hundreds of cross-
references, and substituting a whole new general key and a new
index. The bill for this w’ould have run to hundreds of pounds.
And so with the process, too. Authors sometimes complain that
a few days lateness with proofs on their part grows with the
printers into weeks and months of delay. They do not appreciate
that a specialist reader may have been earmarked to check the
proofs, and a particular machine to print the book. If the work
is not ready for them at the appointed time, neither can stand
idle. They will be put on to other jobs, and it may be some time
before they can again be available. So delays will snowball.

The compositor, who brings the type of a book into being by
tapping out the letters on a sort of a giant typewriter, is a highly-
paid craftsman. His time is money; and much money will be
spent if he must pore over an illegible manuscript before he can
get on with his job. Provide him with an easily legible and com¬
prehensible typescript. Alterations in proof are disproportion¬
ately expensive because all corrections must be done by hand.
This means “unlocking” or opening up the cumbersome jigsaw-
puzzle of type-metal and with a pair of tweezers inserting the new
material letter by letter and space by leaden space. An author
once decided on reading his proofs, that his punctuation might,
with advantage, be slightly heavier. The bill was “To Commas :
£73”. Of course, if the alteration makes a line over-run, or still
worse a page, the corrections bill can soon become astronomical.

It is as important to fix the form as to fix the content
from the outset. If you go to a good printer he can advise you
on the types, the headings, the systems of capitalisation and in¬
dentation that will secure for you the graded emphases you want.
This is a technical problem that must bulk large in any “cata¬
logue work”, such as a Flora. Unless you are an expert, tell the
printer the effect you want and leave him to find the means. To
follow your own fancy may be disastrous, for a type face that
looks pretty to you may be extravagant or unsuitable for the job
you have in hand, or may lack characters or symbols essential to
that job. The special cutting of letters not in the normal “fount”
of type will prove the very opposite of cutting the cost.

Tliere follows the actual production of the book, and in con¬
nection with this I need do no more than explode a few common
fallacies. There is, then, only one factor in production that really
makes a difference to cost, and that is the number of copies
printed. This is because the most expensive item by far is the
initial setting of the type, and the more copies this can be spread
over, the better. The setting-up of the machines, too, that do

84

LOCAL FLORAS

the actual printing, that fold the sheets or that stamp out the
covers, is an elaborate process, and the more copies that can be
run off from the machine once it has been got going, the cheaper
will be the cost of each. The more printing and binding
machinery becomes geared to mass production, the more striking
will be this effect, and the more prohibitive the cost of doing small
jobs. Before the war it used to be reckoned that you could not
without subsidy issue a book at an economic price that the public
would pay unless you printed a minimum of 1500 copies. To-day
that minimum is more like 2500.

In this process of inflation there is one ray of hope. A recent
development has been the invention of flexible plastic plates for
use with rotary printing machines. These plates have an ab¬
normally smooth and even surface. In printing from ordinary
type or stereo plates, the natural inequalities of the metal would
produce a blotchy impression or even cut the paper if they were,
not compensated for by building up the surface of the roller that
carries the paper to be printed, so that bump answers depression
and re-entrant matches projection. This is done by laboriously
pasting little bits of paper onto the roller and testing till an even
impression is achieved — a process known as “Make-ready”. A
complicated make-ready has been known to take three days, and
the cost of this totally unproductive time must be added to the
printing bill. Plastic plates may do away with make-ready, so
that every minute of machine-room time is spent in actually
producing printed copies. No longer forced to carry a quite dis¬
proportionate burden of make-ready, the small printing may
again become economic.

The only way of cutting the cost of the initial composition (at
least until photo-composition becomes a working reality) is to use
one of the methods known as “near-print” ; that is the reproduc¬
tion, by photographic means, of an actual typescript. For this,
it is essential to have the book specially typed on such a machine
as the Varitype, which can offer something of the variety of face
(italic, bold and so on) obtainable in printers’ letterpress. The
disadvantages of near-print are that it lacks quality and defini¬
tion, and also flexibility; subtleties of emphasis and distinction
cannot be clearly expressed as they can through the very much
greater resources of letterpress. It is also impossible wdth near¬
print to make more than minimal corrections. As to costs, I
have been able to make an exact comparison on a book recently
produced by near-print, but also estimated for letterpress. The
production (including binding in cloth) of 100 copies of these 164
pages of fairly straightforward copy would cost by near-print
£210, by letterpress £400. 750 copies would cost by near-print

£450, by letterpress £520. Notice how rapidly, even within this
small range, the price per copy comes down as more copies are
printed. Remember at the same time that the printing of more
copies in order to bring the price down is the classical recipe for
publishers’ bankruptcies.

CUTTING THE COSTS

85

Thus for small printings, up to 800 copies, say, near-print is
substantially cheaper. At 800, letterpress, which can make
better use of mass-production techniques, begins to draw level.
But of course, even with near-print, mass-production can be to
some extent brought in for machining and binding, and the cost
of near-print, even for large printings, is likely to remain about
15% below that of letterpress. It must also be said that near¬
print is by far the speedier process, largely because the author is
debarred from messing up the proofs. (Remember I speak as a
publisher). But near-print is hardly to be recommended for such
a complicated piece of printing as a Flora, unless the number to
be printed is unusually restricted.

One other recent invention deserves just a mention here, the
‘‘cascade” machine. This is in effect a device for converting a
card-index into a printed book, by presenting the cards very
rapidly, but in order, to a sort of cine-camera which records them
as a consecutive list. Printing then proceeds by a normal photo¬
offset process. My Press is planning to reprint its general cata¬
logue by this method, and it might conceivably be used as a
cheap means of reproducing the body of a local Flora, that is the
species records. The index cards would have to be typed origin¬
ally on a Varityper or other electric typewriter.

That binding in paper is in itself a great economy is what Sir
Thomas Browne would have called a vulgar error. What makes
a Penguin cheap is not the paper cover, but the fact that the
books are printed in “runs” of 20,000 copies or more. What costs
money in binding is the folding and sewing, and the provision of
a hard, rather than a soft cover, will add only coppers and not
shillings to the cost. An economy is possible if the folded sheets
instead of being stitched are cleanlv guillotined and then dipped
bodily in plastic glue — the so-called “perfect” binding. But this
process is applicable only when quantities of at least 4000 copies
are to be bound at the same time, and so is more appropriate to
telephone directories than to Floras.

And here may I take up Mr. McClintock’s plea for a loose-leaf
flora. It could of course be done, but it would, I think, be
terribly costly. This is not merely because both the making and
the fitting of the cover itself would not be susceptible to any
mass-production process, and so would have to be done very
expensively by hand. To withstand the wear imposed upon them
by the additional play within such a binding, the pages of the
book would have to be of much stouter paper which would cost
more both in itself and in the slowing down of the printing
machines to accommorlate its abnormal bulk and lack of pliancy.

Last stage of all, distribution. Here the vital question is: “Is
your publisher really necessary?” The answer depends entirely
on the kind of purchasers you expect for your publication. If
they are a small, compact, easily identifiable group, they can be
reached, and serviced, by one man working half-time in a back
room, and there is no place for publisher or bookseller. If, how-

86

LOCAL FLORAS

<

e\'er, the potential buyers are diverse, widely dispersed, and un¬
identifiable until they actually put in an appearance, they can
only be approached through the display and promotion facilities
offered by the book trade. To cover the cost of the trade
operation, the bookseller will require to retain at least a quarter
or, if he is to do the job thoroughly, a third of the published
price, and the publisher will need a quarter of the residue. A
book sold through the trade must therefore be priced at about
double the price of that distributed privately. But there is no
half-way house, and the proprietor of a printed work must make
his choice as to whether he needs professional help or can do the
job on his own. Of course the publisher may be useful in giving-
technical help on other matters besides distribution; but if your
flattery is sufficiently adroit, you can probably get his advice
without actually employing him.

[See p. 92 for the discussion of this paper.]

COUNTING THE COST

87

COUNTING THE COST

J. G. Dony.

“Which of you intending to build a tower, sitteth not down
first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish
it”. — Luke : 14, 28.

It is quite easy to determine the cost of publishing a local
Flora as printers will give estimates, and to these must be added
a few items such as packing costs and postages and the amount
it is proposed to spend on publicity. The figures will show that
the costs increase with a greater number of pages in the book
and the number and nature of the illustrations that are included.
They will also show that the cost per unit decreases greatly if a
larger number of the books is printed.

There are three ways in which a local Flora may be published :
firstly by a publisher, which is rare, and as all the risks are his
we need not consider them now ; secondly by a local government
authority, usually through its library or museum, by a national
society, such as ours, or by a local society or institution; thirdly
by an individual. In the categories which concern us most, costs
must be watched closely as they will be limited by a grant from
the sponsors, or the state of a bank balance.

The costs, whatever they amount to, must be met by sales or
a financial loss to someone, and it is most difficult to estimate
what the sales will be. There is no such thing as a demand for a
local Flora, or for that matter anything else, but only a demand
at a price. Some commodities, such as essential foods, are little
sensitive to price, but others, such as cars and washing machines
are very sensitive. Books, including local floras, are like this.
Lower their price and the increased sales will give a greater
revenue, but raise their price and the decreased sales will give a
lower revenue. There are, of course, limits to these tendencies,
but the would-be publisher must watch very closely his costs and
seek every means to increase his sales.

At this stage it may be useful to examine the nature of the
sales. An analysis of those for the Flora of Bedfordshire showed
that about half were local. These local sales are mainly to non¬
botanists, and depend to some extent on the local patriotism
there is in the area. The national and international sales are
either to libraries, more affected by price than we sometimes
imagine, or to collectors of such works, who are mainly botanists
wanting local floras for a variety of reasons. Price always enters,
for to have the Flora the purchaser denies himself some other
pleasure. I estimate that for an average-sized Flora of a typical

88

LOCAL FLORAS

county, the local and national sales would each be about 300 but
that these would be increased or decreased by 50 or 75 in each
case by good or bad publicity and salesmanship. The lower limit
of sales of 450-500 would make, for its size, a very expensive
book or an unnecessary loss, and the upper limit of 700-750, a
moderately-priced book for its size, and expenses cleared or a
profit made.

This leads back to the fundamental publishing costs and the
need to be watchful of the contents of the flora. An 800-page
book will cost about twice as much, other things being equal, as
a 400-page one, and the would-be purchaser will need much
assurance that it will be twice as useful. It would be a helpful
exercise to find out the smallest space into which it would be
possible to telescope the bare essentials of a county Flora. I think
that it could be done in twenty pages of our Proceedings. If this
is to be increased ten, twenty or forty fold, it is necessary to con¬
sider what the reader will want to know and not the knowledge
that the author wishes to display. The greatest shock that I had
with the Bedfordshire Flora was the discovery one Saturday
morning that it would be 20% larger than our publication grant
would allow, and that I had until Tuesday morning to reduce it
accordingly. I did it without cutting out any essential infor¬
mation, but a month later we received a Royal Society grant
for £300 which, if it had arrived earlier, would have made the cut
unnecessary. We used most of the grant to add an account of
the fungi and more plates.

In considering the contents one needs to bear in mind most
of all the non-botanical local reader. He will be delighted to know
that John Jones, who happened to marr^^ his grandmother’s
cousin, found Grass of Parnassus in Wilton Mead in 1861, and
that Dogwood, so abundant around his village, is absent in the
south of the county; but he is lost when told that Parnassia
palustris grew at Grid Ref. TP/789546 between 1850 and 1900,
and that Thelycrania sanguinea, which he cannot find in any
book in his w^ell-stocked library, is common in Districts 1, 2
and 3, but rare in Districts 4 and 5. The local reader must have
good English names, he does not mind the scientific ones as well,
and above all, needs the names of places and persons. Illus¬
trations present a different problem. I am annoyed when I see
drawings and photographs of plants as I am sure that there are
better examples to be seen elsewhere. It would worry me less if
all the plants dealt with in the Flora were so depicted, but given
a limited number of illustrations, I would rather see more and
still more maps and photographs of natural scenery. I am, how¬
ever, willing to admit that I may be in a small minority.

Publicity is the biggest problem of all, and it is essential that
it should be well-timed. It is useless to spend money sajdng that
the book will be published soon at some price, wide of the mark,
and not have it published in ten years’ time. It is best to get
the publicitj^ under way about six months before publication and

COUNTING THE COST

89

state ‘to be published on a given date at a stated price’ and do
it. Printers will work to a penalty clause and it it useful to bind
them so. The amount to be spent on publicity is also important,
and can be decided quite simply. If 500 copies of the book
could be produced for £1,000, i.e. £2 per copy, and 800 Copies for
£1,200, i.e. 30/- per copy, it would be a benefit to all concerned
if £100 were spent on publicity raising the production costs to
£1,300 if one felt sure that with this publicity the additional 300
copies would be sold. In this case the price could be as low as
32/6.

Assuming that £100 is allowed for publicity, how best may it
be spent? One minute on I.T.V., two minutes on the Odeon
circuit, an advertisement in the Daily Mail, would all be useless.
The money must be spent drawing the attention of the com¬
paratively few people who will be interested to the fact that the
Flora is ready for sale. This is best done with an attractive
brochure boosting the work. For preference this should contain
four pages, two being specimen pages from the book, one illus¬
tration and full details of the contents of the work. Such a
brochure could well cost £30 and with the remaining £70 about
seven thousand copies could be posted. Individual circularisation
is generally better than having it tucked inside a journal, and
societies, local and national, will usually allow the use of their
mailing lists. Don’t worrj^ if some people get two or three copies
as they may need a reminder, and some may even pass a copy on.
Tliere must be some Press advertisement, but this is usually less
effective than the personal approach.

It is usual, with publications of the kind we are considering,
to offer a reduction in price to pre-subscribers. This should be
large enough to make it a real attraction, but care must be taken
not to offend the book trade. At every stage it is essential to
offer the trade better terms than anyone else. Give the maximum
trade discount, even if you think it exliorbitant, and you will
reap a dividend. It may even pay with local booksellers to allow
them to have some copies on a ‘sale or return’ basis. In many
cases the names of pre-subscribers are printed in an appendix
and this definitely helps sales. There is, however, a moral issue
that some hesitant subscribers are almost blackmailed into hav¬
ing their names included.

Publicity does not end with publication, and a book with an
attractive dust jacket sells better than one without. It is also
useful to send out too many copies for review rather than too few.

The details of publication of the Flora of Bedfordshire may be
useful to those contemplating a similar venture. It was published
by Luton Corporation through its Museum and Art Gallery Com¬
mittee. A sum of money was stipulated beyond which expen¬
diture was not allowed to go. Publicity, mainly in the form of a
brochure, began in March 1953, and the copy went to the printer
on 1st June for publication on 1st December. The printer was
prepared to take manuscript, and consequently at least £100 w’as

90

LOCAL FLORAS

saved by not having it typed. No error arose from the compositor
failing to understand my writing — the only errors were in what
I wrote. This method had an additional virtue that the some¬
what complicated punctuation was correct from the very begin¬
ning. The printer worked under a penaltj^ clause of £10 per
day, and the books were delivered a week before the publication
day. This had meant working to a very close timetable which
was as good for us as it was for the printer. A thousand copies
of the book were printed as the Borough Treasurer had to be
convinced that, however long we waited, the publication had
ultimately to be an economic proposition. On this basis the full
costs of publication per copy were 27 / 4d. We fixed the price at
42 / -, but for us there were four selling prices. It was offered to
pre-subscribers, with a final date on 1st September, at 30/-; but
the trade was allowed a 5 / - discount on each pre-subscription
order it handled. There was a slight risk that all the issue
might in this way go to the trade at 25 / - per copy leaving us
with a loss of £100, but our final order for the printing was not
made until after 1st September and we should then have ordered
an additional number of copies. Pre-subscription sales brought,
in £760 leaving us then about £510 to meet. After publication,
we sold to the trade at 28/- (33^% discount) and from the
Museum itself at 42/-. So far we have disposed of 773 copies
(inclusive of seventy copies issued free for publicity, etc.) out of
our original edition of one thousand, and the profit on the ven-
tTire so far is 1 / 8d. It would be foolish to claim that our publicity
was as good as a firm of publishers would have managed. In
some details it was perhaps better than they would have done.
At least it worked.

One question remains, namely the possibility of receiving
financial assistance. The Royal Society grant is available to any
individual or non-profit-making body, and it is interesting to note
that this can include local government authorities, and I know
of no case when it has been refused for a local Flora. There are
two difficulties, as the work must be in an advanced stage of
publication and the amount of the grant is uncertain. It is, how’-
ever, a great assistance to societies having sufficient funds to
finance the publication of a Flora but not wishing to tie them up
for a long period in such a venture. Above all, it does allow the
publication of an otherwise expensive work at a reasonable price.
There may be other similar grants but I am not aware of them.

There is, finally, the need within our society for a policy re¬
garding the publication of local Floras. We have, in the past,
published a number, mainly for areas where there has been no
local machinery which could operate, and this we shall no doubt
continue to do. Should this principle continue further? I have
attempted to show that local Floras can be an economic pro¬
position given two premises, first that they are of a reasonable
length and second that they have sufficient publicity. As a
society we are far too polite with our contributors. More often

COUNTING THE COST

91

we should throw papers back to their authors with the demand
that they be cut to 25% or 50% of their length, or we cannot
consider publication. This we must do if w© venture further into
the field of local Floras. Our publicity, also, is far from satis¬
factory even at a national level, and I see little hope of our ever
setting up the all-important local machinery. With the Maps
Scheme now so successfully completed, work on local Floras could
well receive our attention, but before that is done some hard
thinking will be necessary.

Discussion

Mr. J. C. Gardiner opened the discussion by saying that there was
something ominous about the way these financial subjects had been put
last in the programme. Could it be that, with his experience of Govern¬
ment Departments, the Meetings Secretary still believed that the
Treasury always had the “last say” in any matter? Unfortunately, Dr.
Dony and Mr. David, both widely experienced and expert in these matters,
had, in their clear and heartless expositions, quite convinced us that
finances were all-important. Had their words been heard earlier, he
feared that some of the more attractive suggestions of what we would like
to have as local Floras, would never have been made.

What struck him most forcibly from the advice tendered by both
speakers was that we should, in effect, write our Flora first and do the
research work afterwards! What he meant, of course, was that we should
know precisely what and how little we are prepared to include in our
Flora and then concentrate on collecting the material for that little, avoid¬
ing all extraneous data, which neither our own exchequer, nor that of any
publisher or sponsor can afford to print and publish. The economy drive
must start at the outset, when thoughts of preparing a Flora first germinate.
From then on, the whole of the work must be restricted to what is neces¬
sary in order to produce the best manuscript limited to the size that
finances permit. Only by such methods can the temptation to put more
into the publication than we should, be resisted.

Dr. Dony had mentioned the question of advertising. We seemed
generally to be a little timid about laying out money on advertising.
Surely we have only to consider the relatively large numbers of some
publications which appear to be sold as a result of a bold approach to
the advertising problem in its widest sense. Who knows? — some good
publicity for a county Flora might soon enable him to collect some addi¬
tional subs, from lots more new members! Perhaps the speakers could
have told us a little more about the outlay they would have considered
worthwhile in advertising the type of Flora we all had in mind.

Lastly he would like to defend strenuously the value of sponsorship
by B.S.B.I. in appropriate cases. Such sponsorship should be a particularly
valuable advantage for any local Flora and it should be a kind of hall¬
mark which every editor would like to see on his publication. If the
Society has fallen short of achieving this status, we must make amends —
and make amends quickly. This led him to put forward the suggestion
that we should not break up without seeking some means to encourage
the Society to take an increasing interest in the vast amount of work that

92

LOCAL FLORAS

was being done on local Floras at the present time. He wished to propose
that a recommendation be made to Council that an ad hoc Committee be
set up to consider all aspects of how the Society can assist in this work
on local Floras and to make recommendations.

Mr Cannon said that like everybody else he had greatly enjoyed the
talks given by Mr. David and Dr. Dony. Referring to loose-leaved Floras
in use in the Natural History Museum library, such as the Flora of Hawaii,
he had not found them very satisfactory. One was always afraid that
something might have come adrift from the book and therefore he could
commend only the traditional method of binding for county Floras.

Miss Gibbons thought the number of copies of a county Flora sold would
depend to a large extent on the size and type of county. For instance.
Lincolnshire was large but had a very small population. She suggested
that an interleaved copy would be more useful than a loose-leaved one.

Mr. Bangerter seconded Mr. Gardiner’s proposal that the Society
should take an interest in local and county Floras. He thought it was not
beyond our ingenuity to devise some scheme to put the locality in which
the plants grew on record. One of the ways of doing this was not only
to be responsible for Floras ourselves, but to give all the help we can and
to sponsor them from individuals.

Dr. Perring strongly supported this motion and added that the essential
information on the distribution of plants in a county could, with the use
of suitable symbols, be compressed into a very slim volume: for example,
the account of the Flowering Plants in Burgess’s Flora of Moray is only
40 pages long.

Mr. Warren raised the question of voluntary financial help and men¬
tioned how one member had donated her Premium Bond win towards the
production of her county Flora.

Dr. Dony thought this was a matter for a local society if it were
sponsoring the work.

Dr. Bradshaw wished to return to the question of loose-leaved Floras
as she had felt the need for one. Could not there be some unbound copies
of Floras available so that people couM make their own loose-leaved
books?

Mr. David said that if blank pages were included in a publication it
became liable to purchase tax, Mr. Chandler, who was speaking as an
Excise man, pointed out that if the number of pages were below 25 it was
exempt from purchase tax.

Someone asked what the difference was between the cost of a paper and
a hard cover; and what was the difference between the cost of a page of
letterpress and a page of maps? Mr. David could not answer the second
question but the difference in cost between paper and a hard cover was
very slight — say 1/- on a volume the size of a county Flora.

Mr. Jermy wondered whether county Floras could be expanded so that
they could be used as text-books? Dr. Dony felt that if this were done it
would double the size of the Flora.

Mr. D. Allen thought keys should be included for Ruhus and Hieracium.
Dr. Perring stated that in the Flora of Cambridgeshire they were having

COUNTING THE COST

93

some keys for those groups which are not available in Clapham, Tutin and
Warburg. Mr. Cannon did not think the form of county Floras should be
altered by putting in keys as most people will have a standard British
Flora. He thought there might be a case for Floras of various small areas
centered on holiday regions, i.e., S. Devon. These should be small and
with keys.

Dr. N. Pritchard reminded the Conference that in the days of the early
Floras such as Trimen and Dyer, and White’s Flora of Bristol, much of the
data which was available to the writers was not the same as the data we
have to-day and the situation cannot be the same again. A solid body of
data had been assembled by the Map Scheme in its place. He referred to
Mr. Dandy’s point when he mentioned the Cotswolds, Malverns, etc., as
areas of considerable interest for which Floras might be written, and
pointed out that the areas in between would have to be covered. He thought
Floras of such areas would be of wider interest than purely county Floras
although one should not just do things for the record. Completeness was
not necessary unless the information was going to be used for a definite
purpose. In making a Flora, as in any other branch of scientific observa¬
tion, one’s scheme should be to plan the experiment first and collect the
data after : in other words, before embarking on a Flora one should ask
very clearly what one is going to do with the material and act accordingly.

94

LOCAL FLOllAS

REVIEW OF THE WORK OF THE CONFERENCE

The President, Mr. J. E. Louslej", in summing-up the work
of the Conference, said : —

There are three well defined stages in the production of a local
Flora. First consideration of the aims, second the compilation,
and finally the printing and publishing. The papers and dis¬
cussions of this Conference can be grouped under these headings,
with a fourth — the summarising of the detailed Floras in a
“Comital Flora”.

We started by considering the history and aims of these
works. After Mr. Gilmour had E'kilfully sketched the develop¬
ment of British local Floras over the last 300 years, Mr. Allen
discussed the reasons for their compilation. He made out an
excellent case for individuality, which has been such an out¬
standing feature of past productions. Without this very
British custom of producing Floras recording distribution within
limited areas, a great mass of valuable knowledge would have
gone unrecorded. The discussion which followed these papers
brought out the need for supplements at regular intervals. Per¬
haps the stimulus they would give to further records might bring
nearer the time when new editions were required.

We then considered how the area should be defined and
divided. Mr. Meikle outlined problems of size, politics, natural
features and convenience, and warned us against various dangers.
In leading the discussion, Mr. Dandy advocated using counties as
defined to-day, as the units for publication, provided deviations
from Watsonian vice-county boundaries were clearly indicated
in the text.

Dr. Perring then spoke on methods for dividing the area. He
wisely advocated selecting units of a size which workers could
record within a reasonable niimber of years, and showed how the
Grid system has been adapted to meet the needs of the new
Cambridgeshire Flora. Prof. Hawkes described the methods
employed in collecting data for the Warwickshire work, which is
undoubtedly the most ambitious local Flora undertaken to date.
Probably most of us felt that the method was brilliant and highly
desirable, but the cost in casli and labour far beyond the re¬
sources available in most counties.

These two papers made out an excellent case for the use of
grid squares as units, but the discussion which followed showed
that there are still serious practical difficulties to be overcome
before they can be adopted for all recording purposes. Speakers
drew attention to their lack of appeal to local patriotism, and the

REVIEW OF THE WORK OF THE CONFERENCE 95

difficulty of tracing them in the field. We were also reminded oi
the difficulties of publication since lists of grid squares under each
species are very dull reading, while lists of localities convey in¬
formation at a glance to anyone knowing the county. Neither
does it appear that the publication of maps based on grid squares
is the complete answer since, if these are sufficiently large to Vie
useful, they take up a lot of space and are expensive. Warmck-
shire plan a volume of text and another of maps, but few
counties could aspire to such ambitions. If this is necessary, we
can expect the publication of few new local Floras.

It was also pointed out that the use of grid squares often cuts
across easily recognized natural features. Of this, the Isles of
Scilly, on which I am working, are a good example. In my Flora
I have used the five inhabited islands, and five groups of unin¬
habited islands as units for recording purposes. The floristics of
the inhabited islands with their weeds of cultivation, numerous
introduced species, and disturbed habitats are very different from
those of the uninhabited, and the five islands have individual
characteristics. The uninhabited islands also provide important
contrasts which can be interpreted in terms of size, exposure,
contamination by sea-birds, etc. Now, the Isles of Scilly are
scattered over three 10 km. squares, most of whicli are sea. Idiere
is only one km. square wholly land in the whole archipelago, and
some squares of this size include parts of two islands. The sea
barriers which are of such importance are sometimes so short
that it would be necessary to come down to very small grid units
at great labour to obtain the results demonstrated hy my use of
natural boundaries.

The grid system is already accepted as the basis for a number
of county Floras in preparation, but the discussion seems to indi¬
cate that we should avoid allowing ourselves to become its slave.
Perhaps the answer is to select the best tool for the job, and the
right tool for, say, Surrey, may be the Grid, }3ut the right tool for
Scilly, the individual islands.

Mr. Townsend gave valualile advice on problems of identifi¬
cation. He emphasised the importance of collecting adequate
material, and some of us know from bitter experience how much
this advice is needed. Many specimens sent for identification are
miserable scraps, often carelessly gathered, and sometimes sent
bent round in an envelope without protection. A fantastic
amount of time is spent each year in naming, or trying to name,
plants which would be recognisable at sight from a decent speci¬
men. Plastic bags are cheap and portable, and a little care and
thought can save much of the referee’s time and avoid quite un¬
necessary mistakes. The discussion following this paper brought
out the clesiraVjility of someone concerned with the Flora accepting
responsibility for each critical group, and getting to know the
plants in the field. Sending large numV)ers of specimens to a

96

LOCAL FLORAS

referee involves him in unreasonable work and repetition, and
seldom produces a true record of the distribution. A far better
plan is to get “standard” sheets named by the referee from local
material and to make good use of these. The late W. C. R.
Watson refused to name Rubi unless the senders had made some
attempt to work on them first, and perhaps this is the right
approach.

Mr. McClintock considered old records and made, amongst
others, the excellent points that last records are often as im¬
portant as first ones, and that records for aliens have been too
rigidly excluded in the past. He is on more controversial ground
in advocating the use of place names, old charters, church carv¬
ings and the like. Determinations from such sources are often
little more than guesswork, and the labour involved is consider¬
able.

Before leaving the problems of compiling the Flora, I would
like to draw attention to several aspects which, rather to my
surprise, have not been mentioned. One is the desirability of
publishing some records as they come in. My own experience
with records of the London Natural History Societj^’s area has
shown how effective short annual accounts of the more important
discoveries can be in enlisting support.. Mr. Grose in Wiltshire,
and Mr. Edees in Staffordshire, are amongst others who have
found the same. When people see that use is being made of their
records, thev are verv much more likely to send them in than
when they are merely entered in a manuscript which may not
appear for years. Annual reports have the advantage that they
make sure that the more important records are published
promptly and available to other workers even if the Flora fails
to appear, and they provide an opportunity for including matter
for which there may not be room in the main work, and showing
the relationship between plants found together which would be
widely separated in a large volume. Preliminary publication
helps to get the facts right and complete, and benefits the local
societies which find a place for such reports in their journals.
Another method is to issue an annotated list wdth a request for
additions in advance of the main w ork.

I am surprised that no-one has drawn attention to the im¬
portance of avoiding vague statements. Instead of “has been
found at Reigate” it w^oiild take only about tlie same space to saj"
“Reigate, 1910, in clover field”. The latter gives the date, the
habitat, and a clue to the w'ay the plant may have been intro¬
duced. Published Floras contain far too many statements wdiich
leave the reader guessing. Also no-one has pointed out the im¬
portance of citing references in appropriate cases. Even the best
of Floras is not the final w^ord and it is essential that users should
be in a position to trace back important statements to their
sources.

UEVIEW OF THE WORK OF THE CONFERENCE

97

A great deal more might have been said about the special
problems of Wales, Scotland and Ireland — perhaps here there is
almost sufficient material for another Conference.

From compilation we turned to problems of printing and
publishing, and Dr. Dony and Mr. David gave valuable and
practical advice on the economics of production. A particularly
useful warning was on the cost of heavy correction of the type,
and to this it might ha\'e been added that printers, in correcting
one error, often make another even worse. It is essential to
spend time on getting the manuscript as perfect as possible be¬
fore sending it to the printers, and after that to avoid “second
thoughts”. Dr. Dony’s example of the very successful publica¬
tion of his Flora of Bedfordshire draws attention to the immense
advantage which a local authority exerts in influencing sales of
a local work. This is a valuable suggestion to follow up when
looking for a publisher. As Mr. Gardiner pointed out in the dis¬
cussion, finances will have the last say, and the importance of
advertising must not be overlooked.

I have left until last, Mr. Kent’s paper on the preparation of
a new Comital Flora since this work would be in the nature of a
summary of the detailed records in the local Floras we have been
considering. He stated the case for preparing a new Comital
Flora, and the difficulties in basing it on the Grid System. He
gave us an outline scheme as a practical basis, and suggested
ways of dealing with doubtful records.

Looking back over all that has been said, it seems that the
common thread which runs through almost every paper and dis¬
cussion is the need for individuality. In my introductory remarks
I suggested that every area has its own needs, every worker his
own capabilities, and every district its own level of financial sup¬
port. This has been supported to an extent I little anticipated,
and it seems clear that any attempt to encourage rigorous
standardisation would discourage the production of these excel¬
lent works, and destroy some of their value. Nevertheless, there
is scope for the standardisation of some features without loss of
individuality and need to review various common problems.

Some of the questions arising from the Conference are as
follows : —

(1) The need for published maps to show vice-county
boundaries. This information can at present be ob¬
tained only by consulting the maps at the Natural
History Museum marked by Mr. Dandy.

(2) The need to consider the Grid system in relation to
local Floras and Comital Flora.

(3) The possibility of setting up a Committee to consider
the whole future of local Floras in relation to the Society
and its activities.

98

LOCAL FLORAS

(4) Consideration of the extent to which the Society can
help to sponsor local Floras, and supplements to local
Floras, and give them a hall-mark.

(5) The nomenclature of units of division and especially
“tetrads”.

(6) Publication at reasonable intervals of lists of Floras
initiated.

The meeting is now open for the concluding discussion, and I
hope this summary will assist you to recall the more important
points raised in earlier sessions.

CLOSING DISCUSSION

99

CLOSING DISCUSSION

Dr. Bowen opened the final discussion by suggesting that
there was a need for the publication of a list of people who are
actually engaged in writing Floras and he considered it to be a
function of this Society to keep such members in touch with each
other. He mentioned an example of two groups trying to write a
Flora of the same area.

Mr. T. a. W. Davis referred to the difference of opinion
among those attending the Conference as to w^hether, should a
new Comital Flora be decided upon, the Watsonian vice-counties
should be retained or whether sub-divisions based on groups of
25 10-kilometre squares should be substituted. He considered
any other type of county boundary to be too unstable to be used.
He favoured the 10-kilometre squares as they form a basis for
statistical analysis, and because the decimal system was likely to
be adopted in Britain. The groups could probably be formed so
tliat they coincided to a considerable extent with present vice¬
counties.

Mr Lousley thought that the question of whether a new
Comital Flora should be produced must be referred to a Com¬
mittee as a proposal from the Conference. In reply to Mr.
Westrup who suggested that the same committee set up to con¬
sider county Floras be also asked to deliberate on the question of
a new Comital Flora, Mr. Lousley made it clear that the pro¬
posed committee would have to consider the whole field, with
particular reference to such points as the grid system and the
extent to which w^e can encourage people to carry out the pro¬
duction of local Floras on suitable lines.

Mr. Hall firmly supported the vice-county system but Dr.
Dony thought it would be wrong to use a system that was out of
date; boundaries were going to alter. Mr. Kent was sure that a
new Comital Flora would be sold out in two years.

Mr. Readett wished to draw a sharp line between the two
methods of approach. The Society had made a decision for one
purpose in the Maps Scheme. It had been suggested that an
alternative to a new Comital Flora might be a small handbook
based on the Maps Scheme records but he suggested the answer
was in the hands of the compilers of local Floras.

In reply to a member who suggested the Conference should
vote on tlie system to be employed in a new Comital Flora
Mr, Lousley said that it was not the proper occasion for a vote on
such a matter which should be left to the committee. Dr. Perring

100

LOCAL FLORAS

did not think that anyone was in favour of producing a Coinital
Flora on the grid-square basis and Dr. Dona" pointed out that
many people were using the ‘Tetrad’ system.

Professor Hawkes wished to support Mr. Gardiner’s
proposal (see pp.91-92) to have a committee set up, and it would
be very useful to have interim reports on Floras as to how their
compilers were setting about them. In Warwickshire they had
published a few papers in the local journal about their work, and
it would be interesting to have similar information from other
areas.

Mr. Gardiner reminded the Conference that there was al¬
ready a sub-committee looking into the question of a new Comital
Flora and the committee which he had in mind when he made the
original proposal in the course of opening the discussion following
Dr. Dony’s paper v, ould naturally touch on things of interest to
the Comital Flora sub-committee.

Dr. M. E. Bradshaw thought there should be a committee to
look into the question of ‘why’ some of these Floras should be
published when the Maps Scheme had been working for seven
years and had produced an excellent basis for county Floras to
enlarge upon. Professor Hawkes was aiming very high, but, in
her opinion, anjdhing short of what he was doing was hardly
worth while. She thought the new Comital Flora would have its
uses but it must be something with the aim of filling in gaps in
the Maps Scheme records.

In an effort to encourage a definite conclusion, Mr.
Gardiner restated his proposal in more precise terms : that this
Conference should forward a recommendation to Council that it
set up an ad hoc committee to make recommendations with re¬
gard to the assisting, sponsoring, etc., of the work of these local
Floras and to co-operate with any workers who are concerned
with the Comital Flora. Mr. Bangerter was prepared to second
this. He also wished to thank Dr. Bradshaw for asking a very
important question ‘why’ ; but he agreed with Mr. Kent in think¬
ing that there is still a considerable demand for a Comital Flora.

After discussion had gone the full circle, the PRESiDEN'r_, Mr.
J. E. Lousley put the motion to the meeting and it was carried.
He then brought the Conference to a close.

After saying what a very happy Conference it had been, he
said that there could be no doubt about the success of an event
where so much enthusiasm had been shown, and so many con¬
troversial questions discussed with so much good humour.

He proposed votes of thanks to all those who had read papers
or contributed to the discussions, to the President and Council of
the Linnean Society for the use of their rooms, and to the Meet¬
ings Secretary and members of the Meetings Committee for
making the arrangements, and also to the ladies who had pro¬
vided coffee and tea. These proposals were carried with
acclamation.

CLOSING DISCUSSION

101

Mr. Bangerter, on behalf of everyone attending the Con¬
ference, thanked the President and Dr. Milne-Redhead for acting
as Chairmen.

102

LOCAL FLORAS

A SURVEY OF COUNTY FLORAS

H. J. M. Bowen

In order to obtain background information regarding local
Floras in preparation, a questionaire was circulated to all those
botanists known to have written, or to be preparing Floras. With
two exceptions, all these workers were studying individual
counties, and this sur^’ey was accordingly restricted to county
Floras, 39 compilers of the 45 contacted sent detailed replies; six
of these have actually published Floras during the period 1948-
1961. 13 per cent of compilers were not B.S.B.I. Recorders for

their counties; the Society should publish lists of compilers more
frequently and ensure that compilers are also Recorders for their
areas. An analysis of the replies is given below.

1. Division of the area

51 per cent, of compilers use some sub-division of the National
Grid, 38 per cent, divide counties by river drainage or some other
natural feature, and 15 per cent, record by parishes or other arti¬
ficial feature. These methods of division are not mutually
exclusive and two are sometimes used together. Nearly all
recently initiated Floras are based on Grid recording, except in
areas where geographical features are of dominant importance, as
in mountainous terrain or groups of islands. 10 x 10 km.^ and
1x1 km.^ squares are the most popular sizes among Grid re¬
corders, as shown in the following table.

Average no. of

Square size No. of compilers Average area per squares per

using this size active botanist active botanist

10

km

X

10

km

8

1382 km2

13-8

5

km

X

5

km

1

1406 km2

56-2

2

km

X

2

km

4

880 km2

220

1

km

X

1

km

7

845 km2

845

2. Number of botanists collecting data

The number of active collectors of data for a Flora ranges from
one to thirty or more; some compilers were unable to enumerate
their helpers, but the average is about six. The areas studied
range from 16 to 8000 km-, and the areas per active botanist range
from 16 to 5500 km^ with an average of 1016 km-. This means
that each botanist must search on average ten 10 x 10 km^ Grid

A SURVEY OF COUNTY FLORAS

103

squares, or two hundred and fifty 2x2 km“ squares, or one
thousand 1x1 km“ squares. The table on page 102 shows that
there is little correlation between the area per active botanist and
the size of Grid square chosen. Clearly all botanists are active,
but some are more active than others.

Hundred

pages

V

Fig. 1

Size of area /size of Flora

8"

X X

X

6—

4-

2-

0--

O

X

X

X

X

lO 20 30 ^

X

_ Area

50 60 100 km^

3. Collection of data

Notebooks (57 per cent) are preferred for collection of data
in the field, but Maps Scheme or similar cards are becoming more
widely adopted (38 per cent). The majority of compilers (54 per
cent) keep their records as a card index, but some transcribe direct
from field notes to a draft MS Flora or interleaved plant list. The
useful records from B.S.B.I. field meetings and local naturalists’
outings were frequently acknowledged by compilers.

95 per cent of compilers collect pressed specimens as vouchers,
which are sometimes kept privately (35 per cent) but more often
preserved in a local Museum or University or in a National
Herbarium.

All compilers claim to have searched previous Floras and
periodicals for old records ; 47 per cent have located annotated
Floras or MS lists, often through their local Museums. Only
5-3 per cent mention using N. D. Simpson’s valuable bibliography.
49 per cent state that they have consulted herbaria to check old
records, but many rely exclusively on local herbaria. All com¬
pilers should check through the larger herbaria for local records.

104

LOCAL FLORAS

although this is tedious work because of the lack of efficient
indexing in most collections.

90 per cent of compilers use the B.S.B.I. panel of referees for
identifying critical plants, and the remainder use referees of
proved reliability.

4. Compilation of data

The time taken to compile a county Flora ranges from 5 to 60
years with an average of 23 years between beginning to collect
records and publication. Many Floras represent a lifetime’s work.

Few compilers gave definite replies about how much extra
information they proposed to give other than a list of plants and
localities. It w^ould seem desirable to decide on, and to collect,
this information from the outset rather than to assemble it during
the writing up. The popularity of different items can be judged
from the following list.

Per Cent of compilers

Extra injormation in Flora giving it

Geographical features . 44

Geological formations . 40

Soils . 24

Climate . 36

Biographies of local botanists ' . 12

History of botanical exploration .... 36

Paleobotany . 8

Plant ecology . 68

Plant distribution . 48

Plant distribution maps . 20

Taxonomy of local variants . 12

Local names . 8

Local times of flowering . 4

Bryophytes . 16

Fungi or lichens . 12

Algae . 0

5. Costs

The following figures are based on the small number of com¬
pilers who gave actual figures or reasoned estimates of costs; Mr.
N. D. Simpson kindly supplied figures for older Floras for
comparison.

County Floras may have from 70 to 1250 pages, the average
being 470 pages. Fig. 1 illustrates that there is no relation
between the size of the Flora and the size of the county.

The cost of publishing a county Flora ranges from £150 to
£4000 with an average of about £1700. The average cost per
page to the purchaser is 0-95d, but this has risen steadily during
the century as Fig, 2 shows.

A SURVEY OF COUNTY FLORAS

105

Most compilers appear to have made no estimate of publication
costs, although such estimates are quite easy to make and may be
the main factor limiting publication. Estimates should be made at
all stages of composition, and not only when the MS is finally ready
for the printer. At least three Floras covered by the present
survey are likely to remain unprinted purely for financial reasons.

Fig. 2

pence per page

Rising costs of Floras

X

I-

1/2-

O-

1900 1910

1920 1930

1940

1950

I960

108

LOCAL FLORAS

COUNTY FLORAS RECENTLY PUBLISHED OR IN PREPARATION

v.c. No.

County

Compilers

0 .

. . . Channel Isles . .

. . D. McClintock and Mrs. F. Le Sueur.

lb .

. . . Isles of Scilly . .

. . J. E. Lousley.

5, 6 .

. . . Somerset .

. . P. F. Hunt.

7, 8 .

...Wilts.* .

. . J. D. Grose.

9 .

. . . Dorset* .

. .R. D'O. Good.

10-12 ...

. . . Hants .

. .A. W. Westrup.

13, 14 . . .

. . . Sussex t .

. . O. Buckle.

15, 16 . . .

. . . Kent .

. . F. Rose.

17 .

. . . Surrey .

. , J. E. Lousley, et al.

18, 19 . . .

. . . Essex .

. .S. T. Jermyn & B. T. Ward.

20 .

. . . Herts .

. . J. G. Dony.

21 .

. . . Middx .

. . D. H. Kent.

22 .

. . .Berks .

..H. J. M. Bowen, et al.

25, 26 . . .

. . , Suffolk .

. . F. W. Simpson.

27, 28 . . .

. . . Norfolk .

. . C. P. Petch & E. L. Swann.

29 .

. . . Cambs .

. .F. H. Perring.

30 .

. . . Beds.* .

. . J. G. Dony.

31 .

. . . Hunts .

..J. L. Gilbert.

32 .

. . . Northants .

. . G. Laundon.

35 .

. . . Monmouth . . . .

. . A. E. Wade.

36 .

. . . Hereford .

. . Mrs. L. E. Whitehead.

38 .

. . . Warwicks .

. . J. G. Hawkes & R. C. Readett.

39 .

. . . Staffs .

..E. L. Edees.

48 .

. . . Merioneth . . . .

..P. M. Benoit & Mrs. H. M. Richards.

51 .

. . . Flintt .

. . A. A. Dallman.

53, 54 . . .

. . . Lines .

..Miss E. J. Gibbons.

55b .

. . . Rutland .

. ..J. H. Chandler.

56 .

. . . Notts.* .

. .R. C. L. Howitt.

57 .

. . . Derby .

. . A. L. Thorpe.

59 .

. . . S. Lancs .

. . J. P. Savidge.

61 .

. . . E. Yorks .

. .Miss F. E. Crackles & R. D’O. Good.

62-65 . . .

. . . N. Yorks .

. .Miss C. M. Rob.

70 .

. . . Cumbs .

. . D. A. Ratcliffe.

71 .

. . . Isle of Man . . . .

. .D. E. Allen.

81 .

. . . Berwick .

. A. G. Long.

82-84 . . .

. ..Lothians .

. .Miss E. P. Beattie.

90 .

. . . Forfar .

. . G. Taylor.

91 .

. . . Kincardine . . . .

. .Mrs. A. H. Sommerville.

96b .

. . . Nairn .

. Miss M. M. Webster.

98 .

•••Argyll .

. . K. N. G. Macleay.

102-104 .

. . . Inner Hebrides

..Miss M. S. Campbell.

107-8 ...

. . . Sutherland . . . .

. . J. Anthony.

112 . . . .

. . . Shetland .

. .R. C. Palmer & W. Scott.

H 20 . . .

...Wicklow* .

. . J. P. Brunker.

H 33 . . .

. . . Fermanagh . . . .

. . R. D. Meikle.

tNo recent confirmation.
*Flora published.

H. J. M. Bowen.

EXHIBITS WHICH ILLUSTRATED SOME LOCAL FLORAS

107

EXHIBITS WHICH ILLUSTRATED SOME PAST, PRESENT, AND

FUTURE LOCAL FLORAS

Flora of Merioneth

Methods of collecting records in the county were described with
the aid of maps and diagrams. A Flora of the county is at
present being published in serial form.

P. M. Benoit and Mrs. M. Richards.

Recent Changes in the Flora of Berkshire

The position of Berkshire with regard to local Floras is typical
of several of the better worked English counties. A Flora of great
excellence, listing 1208 species, was brought out sixty-four years
ago by G. C. Druce, and a supplement by the same author in
1918 included only 23 additions to the county list. So complete
was Druce’s coverage that few new discoveries have been made
since his death, although Maps Scheme records showed that the
county had not been completely worked out. The question arises
as to whether there is any point in preparing a new Flora.

For counties of this type it might be better to publish regular
supplements to the Flora, at about ten year intervals. This
method has the disadvantage that species may be neglected for
several decades when they are slowly increasing or decreasing, but
this also occurs with the present haphazard system of recording.
In Berkshire a relatively small number of species have changed
markedly in abundance since 1897. A preliminary list of these,
divided somewhat arbitrarily by habitat, was given, which can be
summarised in the following table.

Habitat

No. of

increasing species

No. of

decreasing species

Woodland .

. 17

3

Acid grassland and heath .

. 6

8

Basic grassland .

. 11

5

Bog .

. 1 ?

11

Fen .

. 3

3

River banks .

. 5

1

Pond margins .

. 2

10

Walls .

. 6

1

Arable land .

. 12

14

Waste ground .

. 35

1

108

LOCAL FLORAS

Graphs of weather statistics and changes in land usage were
given. The climate does not appear to have altered much recently,
though the winters may be getting warmer and wetter. It might
be argued that the gradual disappearance of Northern species (e.g.
Botrychium, Lycopodium selago, Parnassia, Pinguicida vulgaris
and Thelypteris limbosperma) and the spread of species from
Southern Europe (e.g. Euphorbia cyparissias, Hbnantoglossum,
Illecebrum, Nardurus, Silene conica and Tetragonolobus) have
been caused by the warming up of the climate; but the evidence
is not strong when examined more closely. It is quite likely that
the increasingly^ wet winters have favoured the spread of the three
wall ferns, Asplenium adiantum-nigrum, x4. trichomanes and
Ceterach.

By far the most important causes of change in the Flora are
the activities of man. The ploughing up of grassland, the draining
of bogs, the destruction of ponds and the application of scientific
husbandry to arable land are responsible for most of the decreases
mentioned above. x\fter a series of fluctuations caused by succes¬
sive booms and slumps in agriculture, the percentage of arable
land in the countv is as high as it ever has been. On the other

CZ?

hand man has introduced many new species, mostly confined to
waste and disturbed ground.

Berkshire is fortunate in that its riverbanks, its small but
rich area of fenland, and its extensive woods have not recently
been and are unlikelv to be profoundlv altered bv m,an. In these
habitats the gains outweigh the losses and show that many
ecological niches remain unfilled.

H. J. 1\I. Bowen.

The I.leyn Flora

Work in progress on the Lleyn Flora was shown, e.g.
cataloguing the occurrence of the common and the rare species
and more detailed mapping of selected examples : comparison with
Griffith’s Flora regarding his ‘common’ species which appear to be
absent or rare in Lleyn. Distribution maps of selected species were
shown to illustrate the special characteristics of the Lleyn flora ;
its richness in ‘oceanic’ species ; the lack of a rich mountain flora :
the poverty of and restricted occurrence of basiphilous species and
the absence of certain weeds and aliens and of ‘railway’ plants ;
and a general comparison with Caernarvonshire as to the repre¬
sentation of the several ‘geographical elements’.

Miss A. P. CONOLLY.

Samples of printing and printers" copy

A block of printers’ type, together with examples of manu¬
scripts suitable for, and virtually unintelligible to, the printer were
exhibited.

R. W. David.

EXHIBITS WHICH ILEUSTIIATED SO.AIE LOCAL ELOKAS

109

Flora of Bedfordshire

Copies of Prospectus of Flora of Bedfordshire (1953). Pre¬
sentation copy to author by Luton Borough Council. Specimen
pages of manuscript.

J. G. Dony.

Flora of Hertfordshire

A revision of the Hertfordshire Flora was begun m 1955 and
the object of the exhibit was to show the method being used and
the problems involved.

(a) The County. Maps of Administrative County and Watsonian

vice-county; the area of study (a combination of these);
and areas covered by various Natural History Societies
interested m the county.

(b) Features of the County. Maps showing Geology, Rainfall,

Altitude, Built-up Areas and Conservation Areas.

(c) Dividing the County. Maps showing divisions adopted by

Webb and Coleman (1848), Pryor (1887), Swinscow (1959)
and one based on the main geological features.

(d) Recording. Record card showing colours used to distinguisli

records made in various years in the field.

Card Index consisting of sheets with entries in Pryor’s Flora
stuck on and subsequent records added.

Map showing National Grid with four complete ten-
kilometre squares and parts of twenty-six : this has been
rejected as an unsatisfactory basis for recording.

Map showing tetrads of four square kilometres of which
there are 330 full tetrads and parts of 166: this has been
adopted.

(e) Progress. Maps showing the state of recording in 1959, when

30 tetrads had over 200 plants recorded. In 1960 a further
100 tetrads with over 200 records were added and in 1961 a
further 206. At the end of 1961 336 tetrads had more than
200 records and 91 tetrads had 150-200 records.

(f) Some Results of the Study. Maps showing results based on

the above recordings to date: — Dactylis glomerata, a
common species easily recognised in all seasons ;
Rayiunculus ficaria, a common species recognised only in
the spring; Veronica beccahunga, a common species of wet
places; Dryopteris filix-mas, a common woodland species;
Clematis vitalba, a common calcicole; Pteridium aquilinuni ,
a common calcifuge; Orobanche elatior, Impatiens
capensis, and Silene noctiflora, species of restricted distribu¬
tion in the county.

(g) A comparison of the floras of Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire.

Comparative lists of species extinct in either or both
counties and species known to occur in one county only.

110

LOCAL FLORAS

How MANY SPECIES MAY BE EXPECTED TO OCCUR IN A LIMITED AREA

This was an attempt to determine, having given the number of
species known to occur in a county of known area, the number of
species that might be expected to occur in one square kilometre
and four square kilometres. No definite conclusion was reached.

J. G. Dony.

Coloured Reproductions of Four Illustrations in Relhan's

Flora Cantabrigiensis (1820)

The plants shown were Anemone pulsatilla, Thesium humi-
jiisum, Senecio integrijolius and Seseli libanotis. Although Relhan
wrote his Flora some 140 years ago, it is of interest to note that all
these four chalk species persist on the low Cambridgeshire down-
land, now greatly diminished in area as a result of man’s activities.
Seseli libanotis occurs to-day in neighbouring Hertfordshire, near
Baldock, and in Bedfordshire at Pegsdon. The Anemone and
Senecio still occur in both of these adjacent counties and the
Thesium in Hertfordshire.

C. S. Downer.

An Old Warwickshire Herbarium

An exhibit of full-size photographs was shown of some of the
more interesting pages from an old Warwickshire herbarium,
made, so far as can be ascertained, by Henry Holden (1662-1710)
of Erdington, Birmingham, and Fellow of Magdalen College,
Oxford.

The plants were probably gathered between 1688 and 1704,
and are of interest for their scientific and vernacular names, as
well as for their localities, though unfortunately very few of these
are noted. Several plants were collected in Warwickshire, others
in Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Staffordshire, Lincolnshire,
Hampshire and Berkshire. It is possible that some of these might
constitute first county records for the plants in question.

J. G. Hawkes (Birmingham).

Flora of Warwickshire

The exhibit was designed to show the distribution, habitats
and frequencies of plant species in Warwickshire. These are
being surveyed by the method of area recording described. Stages
in the process with some interim data and maps were displayed.

The county is divided into units of one square kilometre,
identical with the smallest subdivision of the National Grid. These
“basic squares”, of which there are about 2500 in M arwickshire.

EXHIBITS WHICH lELUSTHATEU SOME LOCAL FLORAS

111

are being surveyed by a team of botanists from the Botanical
Section of the Birmingham Natural History and Philosophical
Society and the Botany Department of the University. To reduce
the work involved only one in every four of the basic squares
is surveyed. This square is chosen at random so that statistical
work on habitats will be possible ; there will be no personal bias in
the choice of squares which might overweight particular habitats
in relation to their existence in the county as a whole.

Each collector takes one or more basic squares and is
registered for these on the “Master Map”. Several visits at different
times of the year are made to each square and a list is made of
all species found, with habitats and frequencies. The habitats are
grouped into eight major categories :

(1) Woodland

(2) Waterside

(3) Water

(4) Heath

(5) Marginal (i.e., Hedgerows, etc.)

(6) Grassland

(7) Cultivated land

(8) Ruderal (i.e.. Waste land)

Two maps of 1 km. squares and the plant lists obtained from
them were shown together with a Collector’s Card with instructions
for use in the field.

When squares are completed the lists are sent to the Recorders
and the records are copied on to species cards. Species cards have
been designed so that the records for 1 km. squares can be
written within squares drawn to the same scale as on the 1" O.S.
map. Each card represents a 10 km. or major square, and the
whole of the cards for any one species can be laid out so that they
themselves form a map.

The maps shown in the rest of the exhibit are preliminary
attempts at recording the distribution of a number of species. A
distinctive symbol is used for each habitat category. In a few
cases an attempt has been made to compare the distribution of
calcicolous and calcifugous plants with the known geological
structure of the county. A map showing the positions of the chief
lime-bearing strata was also shown.

Finally, a series of habitat analyses has been made to show the
habitat range and preference of some of the species mapped.
These analyses show that although many species overlap consider¬
ably, their habitat preferences do not necessarily coincide. Also
it can be seen that some species (e.g. stinging nettle) have a wider
range of tolerance than others (e.g. stemless thistle).

It is hoped to publish the Flora in the form of a volume of
text and a volume of maps. A map, photographically reduced to
a size suitable for publication, was shown. Transparent outline
maps of soils, land use, drift geology, topography, etc., will be
available for use with the Flora. It wall be possible to place these
over the distribution maps so that further conclusions may be
drawn about the distributions of the species mapped.

J. G. Hawkes and R. C. Readett.

112

LOCAL FLORAS

Flora of Nottinghamshire

Sample MS. pages were shown from this Flora, which was
almost ready for publication.

R. C. L. Howitt.

Flora of Nairn

Six illustrations m colour, by Miss M. A. Grierson, intended
tor the Flora, were exhibited, together with a vegetation map of

the county.

«/

Pressed specimens, about twenty per sheet, were shown
depicting typical plants of saltmarsh, dunes, moorland, pinewood
and cornfield with live material of lichens and mosses.

A short resume of field work already done, records, geolog^^
weather (mean annual temperature and rainfall) and an extract
of the bibliography of the county were included.

Miss M. McCallum Webster.

Flora of Porthleven

A copy of this Flora of a small area, which has recently been
published, was shown. It includes lists of all animals and plants
known in the vicinity of Porthleven, Cornwall.

H. B. Sargeant.

PAora Tunbridgensis

Copies of each of the four Floras of Tonbridge and Tunbridge
Wells, Kent, were exhibited. These are :

Flora Tojibridgensis, by T. F. Forster, 1816, and a second edition
with a supplement by his son, T. I. M. Forster, 1842;

Flora of Tunbridge Wells, by E. Jenner, 1845;

Flowering Plants of Tunbridge Wells and Neighbourhood, by R.
Deakin, 1871;

Flora T onbridgiensis , bj" J. E. Little, 1884-88.

In each case notes on the relative merits and aspects of the
book were given, and an assessment was made of the value of the
flora and any other works of the respective authors to the know¬
ledge of the area in question. A copy was also exhibited of The
Botanical Pocket Book, printed and probably compiled by J.
Clifford, 1840. Most of these works are now very scarce, most of
those exhibited belonging to the Tunbridge Wells Museum.

Clive A. Stage.

EXHIBITS WHICH ILLUSTRATED SOME LOCAL FLORAS

113

Flora of Surrey

The Surrey Flora Committee showed their methods and results
by means of a 10 km. square map divided into 25 “tetrads”, with
examples of “Surrey Cards” (one used for each tetrad), and In¬
dividual Record Slips relating to it. Results were shown on
correspondingly ruled distribution maps for Viola hirta, Molinia
caerulea, Impatiens capensis, Artemisia verlotorum, etc.^

The Surrey Flora Committee was elected in January 1957 to
organise the collection of records for a new Flora and in this task
it receives valuable assistance from a network of helpers.

The Surrey Flora Committee.

Flora of Hampshire

The use of graph paper provides a handy “National Grid”.
Plant distribution can then be compared wdth various factors by
the use of tracing-paper maps.

Some idea w^as given of the volume of work entailed in dealing
with three vice-counties. Even a “tetrad” system calls for over
1000 lists. Assuming an average of 300 species per tetrad for a
good coverage, 22% has been listed since 1950, mostly in the last
three years.

A. W. Westrup.

Flora of Cambridgeshire

Work on the text of a new Flora of Cambridgeshire (v.c. 29) is
now almost finished, and printing should begin early in 1963. The
Flora has been compiled from records of the Cambridge Natural
History Society kept in the University Herbarium. The aim is to
produce a relatively cheap, compact reference work which is up-
to-date on nomenclature, taxonomy and distribution. The
requirements of University students have been borne in mind,
particularly in the inclusion of Pteridophyta and Bryophyta, and
the provision of field keys to certain vascular plant groups which
experience has shown present special difficulties.

The distribution data for any species are given by enumerating
the operative last two figures of the 10-km. National Grid. Ref.
There are 40 such squares partly or wholly within v.c. 29. It is
interesting that the total recorded flora of 52/45, which includes
the City of Cambridge, is the largest in the British Isles — almost
exactly 1000 species of vascular plant! Three centuries of almost
continuous recording is of course partly responsible for this
‘richness’.

114

LOCAL FLORAS

The introduction to the Flora deals with history, and gives a
survey of the main soil and vegetation types. An extensive
bibliography lists the more important papers on the Cambridge¬
shire flora and vegetation.

The book will be published by the Cambridge University Press
for the Natural History Society, with the help of a grant from the
Royal Society. A specimen page was exhibited.

Editors : F. H. Peering, P. D. Sell, S. M. Walters,
and H. L. K. Whitehouse,

INDEX

115

INDEX

Unpublished Floras which have a single reference are included here
under the county concerned, but those which are referred to more than
once are also included under ‘Flora’. Published Floras are shown in italics.

PAGE

PAGE

Abbot, Charles .

Acaena anserinifolin .

adventives .

AlcliemiUa .

Alderney .

aliens . 18, 76,

,, , casual .

Allen, D. E . 14, 19, 20, 27, 58, 69,

Ainai'antbs .

Amsincliia menziesii .

Anacahtplls pijramidalis .

Anemone pnUatUln .

apoinixis . 51,

Arden, Forest of .

Argyll, Flora of .

Arlemisia verJotonim .

Asplenlnm a<Uanfum-ni[)i‘um .

,, Ivicomanes .

Atlas . 7, 8, 71, 72,

autliorities foi- recoials . 77

autlioi-s, professions of .

Babington, C. C . 12,

Baker, .1. G .

Bangertej-, E. B . 19, 20, 92, 100,

HaUioniensis, Flora .

liedfortliensis. Flora .

Bedfordsldre .

,, . Flora ot ... 18, 87-90, 97,

106,

Helfasliensis, Flora .

Belgium .

Benoit, F. M .

Berksbii-e .

,, , Flora of . 106,

Berwicksldre, Flora of .

llihliof/rapliieat Index, Simpson s ...

28,

Bii'mingliam .

bindintf .

,, , loose-leaf . 85,

,, , ‘perfect’ .

binomials, Linnean .

Black Bryony .

lilaelistonia perfoliata .

Jllj/snnis compressus .

bookseller . 85, 86,

Boundaries Commission .

11

Bowen, H. .1. M .

20,

99, 102-106,

108

57

Botanical Looher-out .

12

77

“Botanicum Londinense” .

10

77

Botn/cfiium. .

108

69

Bracken .

5:;

77

Bradshaw, Miss M. E.

. 26,

92,

100

55

Brecbou .

62

92

Breckland .

57

65

Briggs, T. A .

12

76

Bristol, Flora of .

18,

15, 21,

l]5,

9.8

74

British Museum (Nat. Hist.

) ... 19,

26,

110

78,

79,

97

58

Broads, Norfolk .

57,

68

49

Bromfleld, AV. A .

12

106

Bronnis laclniatus

76

118

B.S.B.I., membership of .

19

108

,, , Proceedings of

. 20,

24,

88

108

Buckingbamsbire .

78),

74

76

Butterbur Moth .

69

- 78

18

Caernarvonshire .

108

Calam in tha ascend ens

74

80

CallitricJie platycarpa

55

70

Cambridgeshire .

88

101

,, , Flora

of .

. ,80,

81,

12

92,

106,

118

11

,, parishes .

81

110

Cannon, J. F. M .

92,

98,

Cantabrig lens i s , Flora,

Relhan's

109

12,

110

21

Cardamine ImJbifera .

74

81

Cardaria draba .

75

107

casuals .

.... .51,

75.

76

74

Catalogus, llaA^’s .

.. Plate 1,

10

107

Cenlaarea diluta .

76

106

,, jacea .

62

,, nemoralis .

62

108

,, nigra .

62

49

century, fifteen! Ii .

65

85

,, , seventeenth ..

. 9,

66

92

,, , eighteenib ....

10, 11,

65,

66

85

,, , nineteentli ....

11, 12,

65,

66

10

f'elerach .

108

68

Chamaenerion angastifoliani .

46

74

Ctiandler, .1. H .

27,

92

78

Channel Islands .

59

- 69

90

,, ,, , Flor;

of

106

7'.

Chillerns .

7'i

116

LOCAL FLORAS

PAGE

chromosome numbers . 54, 55

City of London . 75

Clare Island Survey . 24

Cochlenria anglica . 78

collection of data . 37-49, 103

Comital Flora of the British Isles ...

70 - 81

Comital Flora, new . 70-81, 94, 97

compositor . 83

Conolly, Miss A. P . 66, 108

Cornelian Cherry . 65

Corrigiola litoralis . 77

county . 25, 31

,, boundaries . 22, 25

,, Floras, survey of . 102-106

,, , M'atsonian . 23

Coventry . 49

classification, natural system of ...

11, 12

Clematis vitalba . 77, 109

Cravonensis, Flora . 12

Crepis vesicaria

suhsp. taraxacifolia . 76

Crouch, Kent . 67

Cumberland, Flora of . 106

Cyhele Britanica . 22, 23

Dactylis glornerata . 109

Dandy, J. E . 22, 24, 26, 27

dating the records . 78

David, R. W . 20, 26, 81, 82-86, 92, 108

Davis, T. A. W . 69, 99

Deering, C . 10

Derbyshire, Flora of . 106

Descriptio Itineris . 9

Devoniensis, Flora . 11, 12

Diapensia . 83

distribution of Floras . 82, 85

Dog’s Mercury . 53

Dony, .T. G . 18, 26, 49, 81, 87-93, 99,

109, 110

Dorset . 18, 26

Dorset, Flora of . 29, 37, 106

dot-maps . 34

Downer, C. S . 110

doubtful records . 78, 80

Druce, G. C . 12, 52, 63, 70, 75, 107

Dryopteris filix-)nas . 109

Dumfriesshire, Flora of . 18

East Anglia . 76

Echinochloa crus-galli . 75

Edees, E. S . 51

editing Floras . 82

Elms . 62

English names of plants . 88

Eocene . 62

Epilohium . 53, 54

Epilobinm adenocaulon . 56, 57

,, ,, X montamim 57

,, montamim . 57

Epipactis cleistogama . 52

, PAGE

I Erophila . 53

I Essex . 74, 75

I ,, , Flora of . 106

Euphorbia cyparissias . 108

Euphrasia . 55

extinct species . 76, 77

I

I

I

I

i

False Acacia . 67

Fennel . 61

Fermanagh, Flora of . 106

first records . 18, 67

‘Flatford Mill’ by Constable . 63

Flintshire, Flora of . 106

Forfarshire, Flora of . 106

Flora Bathoniensis . 12

,, Bedforctiensis . ii

,, of Bedfordshire ... 18, 87-90, 97,

106, 109

,, Belfastiensis . 2i

,, of Cambridgeshire ... 30, 31, 92,

106, 113

,, Cantobrigiensis . 12

,, Cravonensis . 12

,, Devoniensis . ll, 12

,, of Dorset . 29, 37, 106

,, of Dumfriesshire . 18

,, Europaea . 21, 24, 54

,, of Gloucestershire . 52

,, of Harrow . 21

,, Hertford iensis . 12, 28

,, , of the Isle of iNIan . 15, lOfi

,, of the Isles of Scilly . 95, 106

,, of Kent . 59, 106

,, of the London Area . 25, 74, 96

,, of Merioneth, a Contribution

to . 18, 106

,, of Middlesex . 12, 20, 106

,, of Moray . 92

,, of Xorthamptonsiiire . 63, lOt;

,, of Staffordshire . 96, 106

,, of Sussex . 19

,, of Sussex . 106

,, Tunbridgensis . 112

,, of Weston-super-Mare . 12

,, of Wiltshre . 22, 31, 34, 63,

96, 106

,, Vectensis . 12

,, of Warwickshire . 37-49, 94, 106

,, ,, ,, collectors’ cai'd 43.

Floras, cost of . 90, 105

,, , extra information included, 104

,, , number puhlislied . 11

,, , publishing . 87

,, , purcliase tax on . 92

,, , i*egional . 93

,, , sponsor-ship of . 91

folklore . 18

Forest of Arden . 49

Galingale . 62

Galinsoga parviflora . 76

Galium palustre suhsp. elongaturn ... 77

INDEX

117

PAGE

Gardiner, J. C . 91, 100

Getiliduella aniareUa subsp. septen-

trionalis . 70

,, gerrnanicd . 73

p'eogiapliical distribution . 70

Geographical Handbooh of the Dorset

Ft ora . 29, 37

Genra xintermediatn . 77

Gil)l)ons, Miss E. 3 . 92

Gilbert, 3. L . 27

Gilinour, J. S. L . 9, 19

Giniews; see Marsh Mallow . 03

Gloucestershire, Flora of . fri

Golden Saxifrage, Alternate-lvd . 02

Good, R . 18, 37

Goosefoot . 03

gidd Sfiuare . 22-27, 29-32, 33, lA,

73, 94, 93, 97

,, ,, , Size of . 31-.33, 102

Goetliart and 3on.ginans . 31

Grose, 3. D . 31

Guernsey . 00, 02

Guimauves : see Marsh Mallow . 03

Hall, P. C . 20, 34-33, 99

Hampshire . 20

,, , Flora of . 80, 100, 113

, Flora of . 12

Hampstead . 10

,, Heath . 9

Han; see Galingale . 02

Hanbury and Marshall . 12, 19

Harrow, Flora of . 21

Hawkes, 3. G . 20, 26, 37-49, 38,

81, 100, 110, 111

Hebiides, Inner, Flora of . 106

herbal . 9

Hei-efordshire, Flora of . 100

Herm . 6i

Hertfordierisis, Flora . 12, 28

Hertfordshiie . 74, 77

,, , Fh)ra of . 100, 109

Hieraciurn . 33, 77, 92

,, exotericum . 33

,, vulgatnru . 33

Hirnantoglossmn . 108

Hind and Britten . 20

Hirschfeldia incana . 37

Holland . 31

Hooker, \V. 3 . 12

Hoisetail, Greater . 01

Hf)use-leeks . 64

Howitt, K. C. L . 112

Huntingdonshire, Floia of . 100

hybridisation . 31, 33

liyhiids . 77

idenf ifiral ion of species

lllecebrurn .

fuipatiens capensis

Indigenous Botang .

Inula congza .

30-38, 93

. 108

. 109, 113
. 11

PAGE

Irish XafiD'alist’s Journal . 71

,, Topographical Bolang . 22

Isle of Man . 69

,, ,, ,, , Flora of the . 13, 100

Isles of Scilly, ,, ,, ,, . 93, LlOO

Isle of Sheppey, fossils . 10

Her, 3ohnson’s . 9

3acoh . 10

3ameson, H. G . 31

3 ays . 02

3ermy, A. C . 92

3ersey . 30, 00, 03

Jasione perennis . 73

3ohnson, Thomas . 9, 10

Journal of Botang . 71

Juncus bulbosus . 30

Juniperus communis . 78

Kent . 11, 00, 61, 67, 74

,, , Flora of . 39, 106

., , Flora of . 12

Kent, I). H . 20, 70-80, 99

Kingston and 3ones . 11

Kincardine, Flora of . 100

Lancashire, S., Flora of . 106

landscape gardeners . 63

London Area . 70, 90

,, ,, , Flora of . 23

Lees, Edwin . 12, 23

Leicestershire . 18

Lepidium latifolium . 77

,, sativum . 76

I. e Sueur, Mrs. F. . 27, 36, 69

letterpress . 84

Lincolnshire, Flora of . 100

Life of Ray . 10

Lindley . 12

Linnaeus . 63

Linnean classes . it

,, , system . lo, 12

Lleyn Floi-a . 108

Local Floras Committee . 79, 97, 100

loose-leaf Floras . 83, 92

Lothian, Flora of . too

Lonsley, 3. E . 8, 20, 20, 94-98, 100

Luton Corporation . 89

laixemhourg . 31

J. gcopodiurn selago . 108

Mansel-Pleydell .

:\Iaps Scheme . 23, 29, 31, 33, 33,

72, 70, 78. 79

Marsh Mallow .

Maiiagoii Lily, bulbils of .

Martyn, Thomas .

IMallow .

Malvern Hills .

.McCallum Webster, Miss M .

Mcikle, R. D . 20. 21,

29

99

03

02

10

63

23
112

24

118

LOCAL FLORAS

Merioneth, a Flora of

microspecies .

Middlesex .

, Flora of .

Milne and Gordon .

Milne-Redhead, II .

Mints .

PAGE

... 18, 106, 107

. 11, 73 - 78

. 12, 20, 106

. 11

. .36

. 64

Molinea caerulea .

113

Monastry of Canterbury

Cathedral

63

Monmouth, Flora of .

106

Monliu perfoliata .

76

Moray, Flora of .

92

multinomials .

.. 9,

10

Murray .

20

Nairn, Flora of .

106,

112

Xardnrus .

108

National Grid .

... 73,

102,

109

native species .

76

,, strains .

80

Nature Conservancy .

19

near-print .

, 84,

85

Newbould, W. W .

. 20,

70

Norfolk .

0-)

,, , Flora of .

106

Xorlhdinptonshlre, Flora of

63

, Flora of

106

Nottinghamshire, Flora of

106,

112

(jplnys (ipifera

Oraches .

Oriyaninn vulgdre

(jrobnnch .

„ ehitior
Oxalis tetraphyUa

74

55

109 I

palaeohotany .

Palmer .

,, , Samuel

parishes .

Pnrnassia .

Pays-Bas .

Pennycress .

Periing', F. H. ...

Petasttes fray vans
hybridns
Petiver .

31,

19, 27-36, 58, 81
92, 99,

62 ;
58

63
36

108

31

64

114

69

69

10

Phnlnris ((nwriensis . 76

Philcox. D . 58

PwyiiUuln 7'filgaris . 108

PUintae Cantnbngenses . 10

,, Fdversbamienses . 10

Pleistocene . 62

Phyvioulh , Flora of . 12

PotentlUa non^egica . 75

pf)llen analysis . 62, 68

Porthlei'en, Flora of . 112

Potamogeton . 23

Plerldium agmllnam . 53, 109

Prae.irer. R. L, . 22, 71. 72

pie-Linnean . 9

P.4GE

,. names . 10

,, synonyms . . . 12

printin<r machines . 84

,, ,, , cascade . 85

,, plates, metal & plastic . 84

Pritchard. N. M . 93

production of Floras . 82. 8:5

publication ,, . . 82, 89, 94

publicity . 88, 89 , 91

publisher . 85, 86

publishing Floras . 82 - 87

Pugsley. H. W . 71

PdUdtilUi vulgaris . 77

Queen Charlotte . 11

laihvay embankments . 66

Ranunculus ficaria . 109

,, flaniinula subsp. scoticus 76

Raven, C. E . lo

, Peter . 53

Ray. John . 10

Readett, R. C . 20, 37-49, 99, 110 - 111

records, first . 18, 61, 67

referees . 50, 5i

,, , B.S.B.I. panel of . 52

,, , system of . .58

Relhan . 12

Richards, Mrs M . 107

Richmond Park . 75

river, basins . 30. 31, 33, 36

Romantic Revival . 10-12

Rosa sernpervirens . 66

Royal Botanic Gardens . 75

,, Society grant . 88, 90

Rubu-S . 53, 77, 92, 96

,, ulrnifolius . .53

restitus . .53

Russell, iNlrs. B. H. S . 19

Rutland . 18

Rutlandshiie, Flora of . 106

Salad Burnet .

SdUx .

Salmon, C. E .

salt-marshes .

Sarnolus valerandi

Sargeant, H. B .

Sark .

Scirpus cespitosus

Scott Elliot .

Seddon, B .

Sell. P, D .

Soiecio integrifolius
,, sgualidns

Seseli libanotis .

Setarid ilalica .

Sheringham .

Shetland. Flora of

Silene cornea .

,, nocti flora
Simpson. X D .

.... 65
53, 77
.... .50

. 78

. 112

62, 63, 69

. 78

. 18

IP.

no

no

..76

.57

106

108

109

23

INDEX

119

PAGE

size of area . 103

,, of grid . 10-2

Smith . 20, 36

Smith, Sir J. E . 57

SnoAvherry . 61

Somerset . 22

,, , Flora of . 106

species index card . 4.5, 46

Sparganiurn erectum suhsp. iieglec-

tinn . 77

sporadic species . 76

Staffordshire, Flora of . 96, 106

Stace, C. A . 27, 112

Stachys x nmblgua . 77

status of plants . 77

St. Brody . 12

SleJlaria nemortirn suhsp. glochUlis-

penna . 76

sulispecies . 76

Suffolk . 22

,, , Flora of . 106

Surrey . 18, 74, 7.5, 95

,, , Flora of . 106, 113

Susseip, Flora of . 19

,, , Flora of . 106

Sutherland, Flora of . 106

SAvann, E. L . 36, .56

Sweet Briar . 66

Sycamore . 80

Tannin . 68

tetrads . .35, 37, 98, 109, 113

Tetragonolohus . 108

Teasles . 63

Timothy Gj-ass . 6.5

‘Tliames Valley Sei'ies’ of Floras . 12

Thelypterln Urnbospenna . 108

The.nhini humlfunum . 110

Thornapples . 67

Thy man . 77

Tollund Man . 65

Topographical Botany . 22, 23, 28,

70, 72, 75

Townsend, C. C . .50 - ,58

, F . . 12

Trimen and Dyer . 12, 18, 20

Tunhiidge Floi-as . 112

PAGE

I’lnius .

5o,

62

Umbellife]-ae .

51

Urtica dioica .

47,

48

Varitype .

84

Vectennin, Flora .

12

vegetative reproduction

53

Verbancuin virgatuni ..

77

Veronica beccabungn ..

109

,, filiform is .

76

,, spicata suhsp.

In/brida .

76

vice-county .

23,

26,

.33

,, houndaries

... 22,

26,

52,

75,

97

,, , Praegeiian

22

,, , system .

25,

26

,, , Watsonian

22,

26,

72

-74,

99

Vida, tenuifolia .

75

Viola hirfa .

11.3

Walters, S. M .

49,

.58,

114

Warren, W. E .

92

Warwickshire .

110

,, , Flora of

. .37

-49,

94,

100,

106,

111

Wate}‘ Soldiej', seeds ..

62

Watson, H. C . 12,

22, 28,

70,

71,

75

„ , W. C. H .

.5.3

Watsonia .

24,

52

Wehh and Coleman .

.... 12,

28,

30,

31

Weald .

27,

6.3

Welsh Flowering Plants .

72

Weston-super-Mare, Flora of .

12

Westrup, A. W .

26, .36,

80,

99,

11.3

White, .1. W .

. 12,

.35,

.36,

50

AMiitehouse, H. L. K. ..

114

M’icklOAv, Floia of .

106

Wiltshire .

26

, Flora of .

22, .31,

34,

6.3,

106

WolleA'-Dod, A. 11 .

19

j Yoi'ksliire, E., Floi“a of . 106

i ,, N., ,, ,, . 106

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