A Flora of Suffolk

Martin Sanford and Richard Fisk. 2010. D.K. & M.N. Sanford, Ipswich. 548pp,colour illustrated. (ISBN 978-0-9564584-0-7). £40 hbk (p&p included). Cheques payable to Suffolk Flora Fund to publishers at 78, Murray Rd, Ipswich IP3 9AQ.

Flora of Hertfordshire

Trevor J. James. 2009. Hertfordshire Natural History Society. 518pp, colour illustrated. (ISBN 978-0-9521685). £49.50 hbk or £45 (p&p free) direct from Herts Natural History Soc.

These new county floras should come with a health warning. They weigh more than 2 kilograms apiece and, at blockbuster A4 size, swim with colour photos, maps and diagrams on coated paper. And at more than 500 pages each, they record the county’s wild plants in awesome detail. As usual, each species is mapped at tetrad scale (2 by 2 kilometre squares) with notes on their status, ecology, conservation designations and, for the rarer ones, localities. In the Flora of Suffolk, plant distribution is elucidated with underlays charting the county’s water courses, ancient woodlands or geology. The Flora of Hertfordshire confines itself to vascular plants, but Suffolk adds the bryophytes (Richard Fisk’s contribution) and stoneworts. Both floras include micro-species, hybrids, subspecies, neophytes, the lot. Introductory sections plot the details of the county’s physical and botanical characteristics, their landscape history, their diminishing wild habitats and the noteworthy field botanists of the past. Hertfordshire also contains a list of places to visit. Both authors clearly know their home counties backwards. But they also build on the work of predecessors: three previous floras apiece, dating from 1860 in Suffolk, 1849 in Herts. They were also helped by small armies of contributors; Herts is specifically the fruits of an organized Flora Survey conducted between 1987 and 2005. Both books are handsomely presented and bound; Suffolk even has a built-in bookmark and pretty, patterned endpapers. Martin Sanford has the lighter touch; Trevor James is thorough and methodical but some of his analysis is heavy going.

The keynote of modern county floras, of which these two are surely destined to be premium examples, is change. The floras of a century ago gave the impression of a more or less static countryside in which the localities of native plants, plus a few fully naturalized ‘aliens’, could simply be listed. Today, county floras attempt to capture the dynamic of a landscape in rapid motion. They give equal, perhaps more, space to urban wastelands - car parks, building sites, gravel pits, even streets – as wild countryside. The editor has to try to sort out the mess left by amenity sowings, reintroductions, translocations, habitat restorations and the like. There has been a semantic shift, perhaps mirroring wider cultural changes, from indigenous species to include any plant not deliberately sown by man. That is why modern floras have grown so heavy. Nearly half of the 1,969 wild plants of Hertfordshire and 2,173 in Suffolk are neophytes.

In Herts and Suffolk, as in most of lowland Britain, native plants, especially those tied to wild habitats, are in retreat, whilst newcomers are burgeoning. The parlous state of wild places in suburban Herts is summed up by an image on page 28: a bit of grassy road bank labeled “a surviving fragment of Sandon Heath”. Yet habitat destruction may not be the main threat to plants. A more insidious change is nutrient enrichment, which benefits aggressive plants, like stinging nettle, at the expense of those which depend on sufficient space to flower and set seed. A browse of either flora reveals the heartening determination of plants to colonise any available space, as well as the remorseless loss of many of the familiar flowers of coppice, common and heath.

Martin Sanford’s Suffolk, especially, is full of detail to delight browsers and dippers. More or less at random I learned that cheap coffee contained chicory was grown as a crop at Sedge Fen, that Summer Cypress (Bassia scoparia) is spreading along busy roads “like tumbleweed when detached plants are picked up by strong winds and traffic”, that the haywain in Constable’s famous picture was probably made of local Black Poplar shown in the background of the picture, and that the village of Ramsholt may have been named after the Ransoms which abound in the local woods. Similarly, in James’s Herts, I noted that the occurrence of Wild Service shadows the lost forest of Middlesex, was wryly amused to learn that a rare ancient pear tree was “felled accidentally by well-meaning conservationists at Peartree Pightle”, and was heartbroken to hear that the Pyrola minor I photographed near Tring a quarter century ago, has gone. So: two more classic county floras which are great in every sense. But, I suggest, we must have reached the weight limit of county floras now. Why doesn’t someone write a nice readable mini-flora that reaches out to the thousands of botanophiles that are less concerned with the minutiae than with the simple pleasures of flower finding? No, not me – you!

Peter Marren