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The Essex Naturalist
The impetus to start this program came from several areas. During the initial
mapping exercise contact had heen built up with around 150 botanists living or doing
some recording in Essex, and following my appointment as successor BSBI Recorder
to Stanley, circulation of a booklet summarising possible future recording projects in
the county (in 1976) brought in a stream of records that has continued ever since.
The biggest setback to the mapping and any potential new Flora was however the loss
of Stanley's filing cabinets of letters, site lists and detailed notes on the rarities of the
county, which were destroyed when these were taken over by the Essex Naturalists'
Trust. This necessitated visiting or asking others to revisit numerous sites all over the
county to re-gather information on our rarest and most endangered plants. In many
cases publication of the 1974 Flora resulted in new sites coming to light as botanists
realised that we did not know about them. At first these were assembled on the backs
of the map cards, this information providing, for example the Essex data for the
revised maps in the 2nd edition of the BSBI Sedges Handbook. Acquisition of a
Sinclair QL computer, however, began to revolutionise the assembly of records and a
start was made on producing comprehensive data files on local and rare plants for an
eventual consultative Red Data File of Essex plants. In 1978 the scientific committee
of the Colchester Natural History Society (CNHS), decided to take up my challenge
in the 1976 possible Botanical Recording Projects booklet to map the distribution of
Dittander on a 1 x 1 km square basis. Also around 1978, Jeremy Heath made out a list
of records from Jermyn's Flora for each 10 x 10 km square, and from my maps, the
records that had been made to the 1 x 1 km square level, and from 1979 lists of
additional 1 x 1 km square records for the CNHS recording area began to appear in
the CNHS publication Nature in North East Essex. Then, from 1982 onwards, Alan
Wake organised botany recording/tuition meetings every Tuesday evening throughout
the growing season, initially to map the flora of the Roman River Valley, and a steady
band of list-making botanists began to be recruited. In addition, by the 1982 flowering
season, Trev Tarpey had written a PC-based computer program, and Terri Tarpey had
incorporated Jeremy Heath's lists into a computerised database. From then on the
CNHS was all set to map the whole of their recording area on a 1 x 1 km square basis.
This monumental work, probably the first really detailed mapping of any area since
Ronald Good's Flora of Dorset, (Good, 1948) was eventually published in 1990 as the
Wild Flowers of North East Essex (Tarpey 6k Heath, 1990).
Meanwhile, as county recorder, I was pressurised to complete the BSBI's
Monitoring Scheme, a pilot project for the Atlas 2000 proper, in which we were
asked to re-record every third 10 x 10 km square during 1987 and 1988. In our case
this involved squares TQ49, TQ79 and TR09 in the south of the county, and TL42,
TL72 and TM02 in the north. Without the help of Shirley 6k Charles Watson,
Jeremy Ison, Tim Pyner, Bill Chisholm and Ian Rose, we would never have made it
in time. Fortunately, we decided that all our records would be kept on a 1 x 1 km sq.
basis so that they could eventually be used for our own new county Flora.
Then in 1990 the BSBI Scarce Plants Project was launched and from 1991-1992
we struggled to record on a 1 x 1 km sq. basis the location and abundance of 163
'scarce' species. Unfortunately, for us, many of these species were considered scarce,