vascular plants on a tetrad basis summarized on over 880 tetrad maps (£49.50 from
Herts Natural History Soc. ISBN 978-09521685-8-4). This is the second tetrad flora of
Herts., the first being by John Dony in 1967 based on a survey started in c. 1950.
Then came A Flora of Suffolk by Martin Sanford and Richard Fisk, published by
Martin & Katherine Sanford ISBN 978-0-9564584-0-7 (£42 from Summerfield Books)
covering the bryophytes as well as the vascular plants, again in 21 x 300cm format but
3cm thick. A county some 2.35x the area of Herts. This has got to be the most lavishly
produced county flora yet, absolutely stuffed full of superb high resolution photographs,
many of them as wide strips right down the outer half of pages. It too is a tetrad flora
covering 2,500 taxa of vascular plants and 400 bryophytes, most of the records being
acquired by surveying since 1980 and summarized on over 1,000 maps. I have purchased
copies of both Floras for our EFC library which you will be able to come and browse
when our new centre at Wat Tyler opens next year.
And that's not all! Eric Philp almost single handedly mapped the vascular plant flora
of Kent on a tetrad basis between 1971 and 1980, and has now done it all over again!
His new Flora is now in press to be published by the Kent Field Club.
Don't forget to buy your new 3rd edition of Clive Stace's New Flora of the British Isles
just out and available from Amazon Books at £37.49!
Essex Botany Group 'Spring Chicken' get-together
Ken Adams 63 Wroths Path, Baldwins Hill, Loughton. Essex IG10 1SH
No you haven't missed it! You weren't left out! Dates filled up so rapidly that it was
not possible to get everyone together on a common date. Instead we will tackle the
problems in two ways. Those people who I hope to 'press gang' into helping with the
big push to map the large outstanding areas of South Essex will be invited to several
'info day' plus free lunch sessions in small numbers, the rest of you please can you go
through the information request here for now and we will have a full meeting plus
buffet lunch in the autumn.
As most of you will know, we are mapping the county on a 1km square basis, and so
far we have 404,653 Vascular Plant records entered on MapMate, 280,000 of these
coming from Terri Tarpey's database for North East Essex which Bob Ellis kindly
converted for us from Excel files provided by Terri. There are however many thousands
for the rest of the county still in paper and card form and so I am now employing a
couple of people to enter data from the cards and data sheets so that I can spend time
going through all my many thousands of species based records which would be difficult
for anyone else to enter. To pay for the project we are charging commercial organizations
for data searches.
Essex Field Club Newsletter No. 62, May 2010
19