Taxonomy and nomenclature are the most important branches of every science and for that matter everything we do. Get it wrong and a surgeon could operate on a lung instead of a kidney, or a shopper could buy arsenic instead of sugar. Most of us are very bad with names and scientists are no exception. Some of us get better at our particular subject but remain slapdash about all associated subjects. Ecologists develop a broad range of knowledge but sometimes their knowledge of taxonomy is not precise enough to explain the subtleties of why one variant is in a particular place but not another or why a particular insect only visits a particular variant of a plant. Television shows us some wonderful documentary films on nature and describes in great detail the birds and animals but hardly mentions a plant and, when it does, often gets it wrong. It is infuriating for someone interested in both plants and poetry to hear Wordsworth's famous poem on Daffodils quoted and then to be shown an image of the cultivated ‘February Gold’ which has nothing to do with the Daffodil of the Lakes. When P. D. S. sat on conservation bodies in Cambridge he was always supported by the late John Smart, an entomologist, because Smart said that if the botany is all right it is all right for the insects.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF OUR FLORA

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 in 1776 by William Withering's A botanical arrangement of all the vegetables naturally growing in Great Britain, the first of many floras written primarily for the amateur.

James Sowerby's English botany, the text of which was written by J. E. Smith, was first published between 1790 and 1814. 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 1886, has inferior illustrations, but its text, rewritten by James Boswell Syme, is still important for its nomenclature and infraspecific taxa.