A Flora of Suffolk. M. N. Sanford & R. J. Fisk. Pp. 552. D. K. & M. N. Sanford, Ipswich. 2010. Hardback. £40.00 ISBN 978-0-9564584-0-7.

I share the popular distrust of glossy books, as their glossiness is often a sign that appearance has been given priority over content. My heart sank, therefore, when I opened this extremely glossy Flora, but it did not take me long to realise that this first impression was quite wrong. A Flora of Suffolk is in fact an excellent account of the charophytes, bryophytes and vascular plants of Suffolk, one of the most rural and attractive of the English counties and one which, we are told, is “far from flat”, reaching 128 m at its highest point.

In ‘A personal introduction’, Martin Sanford tells us that his mother’s family have lived in Suffolk for at least twenty generations, and the book is imbued with a sense that the plants we see in the county are the result of thousands of years of human occupation and exploitation of the landscape. The introductory material devotes 20 pages to landscape history and draws on numerous works by Suffolk authors such as Thomas Tusser’s Five hundreth pointes of good husbandrie (1573) and Robert Reyce’s Breviary of Suffolk (1618), as well as on the published accounts of visitors. A fascinating series of graphs shows changes in the acreage of cultivated crops and the numbers of farm animals since 1860 (though plotting the graphs over a relevant photograph gave me an unpleasant feeling of sensory overload). This is followed by an account of the habitats of Suffolk, illustrated by photographs and coincidence maps of their characteristic species. Although Suffolk has, like everywhere else, suffered greatly from agricultural improvement in recent centuries (as shown, for example, by a map of the reduction in heathland from 1783 onwards), a surprising number of fragments of species-rich habitats survive inland, and the coast has some extensive, and often surprisingly quiet, tracts of semi-natural habitats.

The Victorian Floras of Suffolk, by Henslow & Skepper (1860) and Hind (1889), were rather pedestrian. Simpson’s Flora of Suffolk (1982) was the only 20th century account and in this book Sanford does not really face up to its limitations. Francis Simpson is clearly a local hero but outsiders are not likely to be convinced by the description of his Flora as “a classic of its kind”. It is in fact sui generis, one of the most eccentric of Floras and one which contains some original material of great interest but few localised records in the Flora (or its supporting archive) and rather too many dubious records, especially of hybrids, which are not backed up by voucher specimens. The absence of a large corpus of detailed older records limits the opportunity to analyse change in the Flora. In an introductory chapter Martin Sanford makes the best of the available material, listing extinct species, discussing native colonists, showing that few species have changed significantly at the 10-km square scale and demonstrating that change in the county parallels that in Britain as a whole (the main exception being a group of arable weeds which are declining nationally but holding their own in the county). However, the species accounts show the alarming decline in recent decades of some of the rarest species in the county, particularly the Breckland perennials Artemisia campestris, Festuca longifolia and Thymus serpyllum. An interesting table quantifies the extent to which species are Suffolk specialities.

The species accounts give details of the habitats of all Suffolk’s species and cite localities for the rarer plants. Local specialities such as Primula elatior, Pulmonaria obscura and Trifolium ochroleucon are particularly well-covered, as are some charismatic aliens including Fritillaria meleagris and (in Suffolk) Colchicum autumnale. Like the introductory chapters, these accounts draw on a wide range of sources. Take as an example Ribes uva-crispa, an ordinary species about which few Floras have anything interesting to say. Although it is often thought to be native, we learn that Edward I’s fruiterer imported bushes from France in 1275, paying threepence each, “hardly likely if it was growing here as a native”. Sanford then draws on The vocabulary of East Anglia (Dawson Turner et al., 1830) in his discussion of its English name Feaberry, its abbreviation to Feabes (pronounced Fapes) in East Anglia and its relationship to Fapes Hill near Finningham. Tetrad maps are provided for many species, often showing records over an appropriate soil or habitat map. Many species show patterns determined by the light Breckland soils in the north-west of the county and the Sandlings of the east, with a large wodge of clay between them. The maps usually show records from 1980 onwards, with earlier records occasionally included as a separate symbol. The maps are admirably clear, although some of the attempts to map three taxa together (e.g. Silene alba, S. dioica and their hybrid) are over-ambitious. The occurrence of naturalised populations of native species is often mentioned in the text but unfortunately these records are not distinguished on the maps. Photographs occur throughout the text. They are mainly sharp, rather clinical close-ups, some of them of disembodied flowers, which usefully compare some similar species but rarely provide any sense of place (those of Lupinus arboreus and other coastal species are splendid exceptions). A few photographs of native species (e.g. Caltha palustris, Nymphaea alba) appear to represent alien genotypes, and that of Juncus bufonius agg. looks to me as if it could be J. foliosus, which is not otherwise mentioned in the Flora.

The Flora integrates records from B.S.B.I. national projects, county surveys of churchyards, protected roadside verges, nature reserves, ponds and veteran trees, ‘Phase II’ surveys of grasslands and woodlands and tetrad recording specifically for this Flora. The coverage is good, especially in the north of the county where an experienced team who cut their teeth on A Flora of Norfolk (1999) contributed many records. There are excellent accounts of some infraspecific taxa, such as the subspecies of Medicago falcata and the taxa of the Prunus domestica/spinosa complex. In general, however, recording of difficult and critical taxa is similar to the national average, so that Lycium records have to be aggregated, most recorders have not distinguished the subspecies of Ranunculus ficaria and the commoner Salix hybrids appear to be under-recorded (there are no recent records of S. caprea × viminalis). These difficulties are honestly described, but what can we do as a botanical society to raise our standards so that the relatively straightforward subspecies and hybrids are well recorded? Should this not be a higher priority than recording the same areas every decade to our current standards?

Whereas the vascular plant records in the Flora draw on many different surveys, the substantial account of the bryophytes (68 pages) is largely the work of one man, Richard Fisk. The maps are based on records from 70% of the county’s tetrads. To cover two vice-counties in such detail is a remarkable achievement, especially as they were very badly under-recorded before the start of the current survey. This coverage has certainly not been achieved by simply and superficially recording only the most easily identified species. Plants requiring microscopic study, such as the tuberous Bryum species, are conspicuously well-recorded. This bryophyte Flora will be an invaluable source of information on the habitats and frequency of mosses and liverworts in lowland England.

In the past many tetrad Floras have been simply atlases of vascular plant distributions, often lacking any historical records and with only a meagre text. The recent Flora of Hertfordshire (2009) by Trevor James and this Suffolk Flora, which combine tetrad maps with a detailed and original text, are encouraging signs of how the genre is developing. The dichotomy between ‘tetrad’ and ‘traditional’ Floras, never absolute, should become a thing of the past as future authors realise that a fusion of the two traditions can give a much better book than either a traditional Flora without maps or a simple atlas.

C. D. Preston