A Web-based Flora
Publishing a flora solely on the web is unconventional but has the following advantages:
It is available freely to a wide audience.
Errors and omissions can be corrected readily.
It can be updated as new records are made.
The author can react to comments from his readers.
Against this:
It cannot be carried around the area unless one has a web-enabled telephone or other suitable portable apparatus.
There is no single item to act as an archive.
It is not available to a small number of potential readers who have no access to the Web.
This flora is a dynamic item rather than an unchanging document. I hope you like it. Please feel free to send comments and corrections via my home page http://www.bsbi.org.uk/north_ebudes.htmlor blog http://skyeraasayplants.wordpress.com/ .
I have chosen to order the plants alphabetically by their scientific name. In this I am following Pearman & Preston, 2000. I find this the easiest way to find things, but I am aware that this approach loses the benefits of grouping taxa by family, which makes it easy to see e.g. how many types of orchid are present. The downside of listing by taxonomic order is that you can never find anything without referring to an index. A list of plants in taxonomic order is also given with each plant liked to its main entry.
Ordering the plants by vernacular name is too fraught to my mind: Glabrous Whitlowgrass or Whitlowgrass, Glabrous? Different people use different names for the same plant: Sticky Willie or Cleavers or Goosegrass - or all of them?
I have put common names on a separate page with each name linked to its entry in the main list.
Still, scientific names have an unpleasant habit of changing too. Where I have followed a recent change e.g. Comarum palustre for Potentilla palustris and Neottia for Listera, I have tried to remember to list the old name and link it to the appropriate entry. I have not (yet) adopted the specific epithets for the previous subspecies of Dryopteris affinis.
The facility to search this site included on the Home Page makes the order of the plant list rather less important.