Flora of Cambridgeshire

"Cambridgeshire has the longest and most detailed record of wild plants of any county in Britain, and quite possibly in the world...At the same time, few counties are as thoroughly transformed as Cambridgeshire. The remaining hotspots for native plants are tiny islands in an ocean of farmland or built-up land. As many as 120 species of native vascular plant have been lost since Babington’s day....And yet this new Flora of Cambridgeshire dwarfs its predecessors. Field botanists have become increasingly specialised, and are as likely to look for plants on walls and churchyards as in nature reserves. Hybrids, micro-species and garden escapes are now routinely given the same treatment as native plants, and variation within a species is also minutely documented. Hence, Alan Leslie’s new Flora details 2,330 plant ‘taxa’, twice as many as the 1964 Perring one – and in a great deal more detail....If all that sounds a bit breathtaking (and it is), this is a perfectly readable and well-designed flora, full of exactly the sort of information that interests field botanists. It is radical both in its exclusion of the usual maps and in its depth of detail. Like some other recent floras, it forms a kind of testament: to years and years of detailed recording, to the state-of-the-art of field botany, and to a clear intention on the part of the author to leave nothing out."   Peter Marren, British Wildlife Magazine