22
BOTANICAL RECORDING IN ESSEX
I would haue liked in this centenary year of the Field
Club to haue surveyed the changes that haue taken place
in the flora of Essex ouer the last 100 years. Unfort-
unately however, there are large gaps in our knowledge
of the flora during this period which will have to be
filled by further researches before this can be done with
any authority.
The first Flora of Essex, by George S. Gibson published
in 1846, attempted to compile all the records of Essex
plants then available from the earliest times. Between
1846 and 1930, the starting date for the second vascular
plant Flora of Essex by Stanley T. 3ermyn, however, a
period of 84 years remains largely undocumented. With
the formation of the Field Club in 1880, a steady stream
of records began to accumulate in the Essex Naturalist,
but these have never been collated and published in one
volume. Furthermore, the majority of the herbarium
material in the Essex Museums has never been catalogued
or fully authenticated, and many thousands of herbarium
sheets of material collected in Essex occur in museums
dotted around the country. Apart from the historical
value of these early records, they can often give a clue
to the localities for plants that still remain to be
rediscovered. A further reason for cataloguing and
authenticating these herbarium records is that in many
museums curation leaves much to be desired and material
is being irretrievably lost.
In 1968, A.G. Pettifer attempted to do for the bryophytes
what Gibson had done for the higher plants, a daunting
task. His Bryophyte Flora of Essex lists all the
moss and liverwort records known at that date. Although
the first record of a bryophyte from Essex, Lunularia,
collected by Dale and described new to science by Ray
in 1686, would suggest a long line of recording, the
main spate of records begins in the 19th century. Never-
theless herbarium material, again largely uncatalogued,
is scattered in museums all over the country and in private
collections, and new records are still being made from
these herbaria.