HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The first real flora of these islands was John Ray's Catalogus Plantarum Angliae et Insularum Adjacentium in 1670. The first flora to use the Linnaean binomial system of nomenclature was William Hudson's Flora Anglica nearly a hundred years later in 1762. This was followed by William Withering's Botanical Arrangement of all the Vegetables naturally growing in Great Britain in 1776–92, the first of many floras written primarily for the amateur.

James Sowerby's English Botany, whose text was written by J. E. Smith, was first published between 1790 and 1820. It presented for the first time a complete set of coloured illustrations of our plants, illustrations which are still unsurpassed for line and colour. The third edition, published between 1863 and 1872, has inferior illustrations, but its text, rewritten by James Boswell Syme, is still important for its nomenclature and infraspecific taxa.

Three especially famous floras were produced in the nineteeth century. George Bentham's Handbook of the British Flora in 1858 was written as a before-breakfast relaxation. In it keys appeared for the first time in a British flora. It was revised by J. D. Hooker in 1886.

J. D. Hooker's Student's Flora of the British Islands, first published in 1870 and finally revised in 1884, had very clear and concise descriptions and was the main flora used by many generations of botanists up until the 1950s. It is also important in that Hooker was one of the first authors to make frequent use of the category of subspecies.