THIS IS PRIMARILY A BOOK about the common plants that give the colours to our countryside. What makes some plants common is as interesting as what makes others rare. The most interesting plants of all are often those that are neither very common nor very rare, but are characteristic of particular soils or particular situations in the landscape. They prompt that classic New Naturalist question, ‘why?’
I have always been fascinated by vegetation, and by the subtle, and sometimes striking, colours with which it paints our landscape. My mother had a cherished copy of Bevis & Jeffery’s 1911 book British Plants: their Biology and Ecology from her schooldays, which I read avidly, and soaked up the findings of early British plant ecology. ‘Oak–birch heath’ was recognisable on Harrow Weald Common within easy reach of our home in Harrow, and I knew (or could visualise) many of the other vegetation types described. The Chilterns lay to the north of us, and my aunt lived in Woking close to Surrey heathland, which was much more extensive then than now. In 1946 we moved to Hampshire, so in my mid-teens I found myself within easy cycling distance of the New Forest on one side and Purbeck on the other. Undergraduate years in Cambridge brought me into contact with inspirational teachers (of whom I owe a particular debt to Harry Godwin and Max Walters) and fellow students, and gave me a new landscape to explore. Subsequent postgraduate work provided the incentive and opportunity to get to know better the British chalk and limestone, and to make the acquaintance of Scotland, Connemara and the Burren. A first job in the Nature Conservancy in Bangor, and hill walking in Snowdonia in every month of the year, brought home the varied colours of the hill grasslands, at their best and most distinctive in autumn. In the high summer months they all too often merged into a near-uniform green, a dead loss for landscape (and ecological) photography!
The present book has had a long gestation. In 1968, I revised the late Sir Arthur Tansley’s Britain’s Green Mantle for a second edition. About 1975, Allen & Unwin, the publishers, wrote to me asking whether I would consider revising it again for a third edition. I demurred, for two reasons. First, so much new material was appearing that I feared that so much new wine would burst an excellent old bottle. Second, in 1975, we were just embarking on fieldwork for a National Vegetation Classification (NVC) and it seemed inappropriate to embark on a new popular book until the NVC was finished. In the event the first of the five volumes of British Plant Communities appeared in 1991, and the last in 2000, rounding off a no-less-astonishing achievement on the part of John Rodwell, who saw the project through and wrote almost all the text, than Tansley’s British Islands and their Vegetation half a century earlier. All thought of a new semi-popular book on British and Irish vegetation had been put on hold during the NVC project. When the New Naturalist on the Natural History of Pollination, which I had written jointly with Peter Yeo and Andrew Lack, was published in 1996, Collins asked me if I had another New Naturalist I would like to write. Fifteen years have passed since then, largely because I had greatly underestimated how long it would take to work up accumulated research data (some of which finds its place here) on chemical analysis of mire waters, and bryophyte physiology. A positive spin-off of the delay is that, with a new millennium, it is easier to put the long shadow of Tansley behind us, and take a fresh look at British and Irish vegetation in the light of twenty-first-century realities.
This book is intended to be readable, informative and sometimes thought-provoking. It is in no way a textbook. It is aimed at anyone interested in natural history or in our countryside. I am aware of writing for two constituencies, those who habitually use Latin names of plants, and those who are happier with names in the vernacular. In my experience few people are fully bilingual in this matter! Continental readers (of whom I hope there will be many) are likely to find Latin names more accessible than English names. Both Latin and English names of vascular plants follow the second edition of Clive Stace’s New Flora of the British Isles (1997), the same author’s Field Flora of the British Isles (1999) and the New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora (Preston et al. 2002). I have not adopted the names in the third edition of Stace’s Flora (2008), because it seemed more important to preserve the consistency between this book, the New Atlas and the Field Flora. Latin names of bryophytes follow the second edition of Tony Smith’s Moss Flora of Britain and Ireland (2004), Jean Paton’s The Liverwort Flora of the British Isles (1999) and the British Bryological Society’s Mosses and Liverworts of Britain and Ireland (Atherton et al. 2010); I have deliberately not added to the Tower of Babel by giving English names of mosses and liverworts, which very few people know or use. Lichen names follow Frank Dobson’s Lichens (2011).
I have made use of ‘boxes’ in some chapters for technical matter that some readers will feel short-changed without, but others may prefer to pass by. Much the same might be said of the lists of common or characteristic species of many of the communities. Read past them if you feel they interrupt the flow of the narrative; there will be other readers who value them – or maybe you yourself will turn back to them on another occasion. I have tried not to burden the text with too many references, and have not attempted to be comprehensive. Readers needing more detail will find many references in Rodwell’s five volumes, or in the books listed here on individual vegetation types or topics. Vegetation is a compellingly visual subject, whether at the level of the individual plant or of the landscape, so this book contains a lot of pictures, accumulated over the years from the 1950s onwards. Vegetation changes, and consequently some of the pictures have archival interest, so I have generally dated them.
Any author of a book of this kind must owe a debt to his predecessors. Throughout, I have leaned heavily on John Rodwell’s British Plant Communities (1991–2000). The present book takes a broad-brush approach to British and Irish vegetation, which means that I have ignored many of his sub-community distinctions. Where it seemed appropriate I have added NVC numbers as superscripts to the community description. Obviously, NVC numbers strictly apply to Britain alone. In many cases, Irish plant communities are essentially ‘the same’ as parallel communities on the sister island, although there are Irish communities that have no close parallel in Britain. My debt to Tansley is less immediately obvious but nonetheless great. In historical matters I have made extensive use of Oliver Rackham’s books, notably The History of the Countryside (1986). Other books that have been a source of inspiration in various ways are those by Praeger (1934), Westhoff and Den Held (1975), Oberdorfer (1949, 1973), Wilmanns (1978), Ellenberg (1988) and not least, that splendid cooperative project the New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora, a wonderful source of ecological and plant-geographical insights.
Many individuals have helped over the years, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, in the preparation of this book, and I cannot hope to name them all. John Birks, Margaret Bradshaw, John Cross, Gerry Doyle, Wanda Fojt, Philip Grime, Daniel Kelly, Colin Legg, Richard Lindsey, Roger Meade, Martin Page, Adrian Pickles, Donald Pigott, Chris Preston, Tim Rich, John Rodwell, Jim Ryan, Micheline Sheehy Skeffington, David Streeter, Peter Tyler, Richard West and Bryan Wheeler have all contributed, by reading and commenting on chapters, and by answering my questions, or have helped materially in various other ways. I thank Colin Harrower of the Biological Records Centre for printing distribution maps, the British Schools Exploring Society on whose 1971 expedition to Iceland Figures 20 and 23 were taken, Patricia Macdonald, and Lorne Gill and Betty Common of SNH for their ready help in locating aerial photographs, Iain Thornber for the air photographs of Claish Moss, the University of Exeter for my continuing University Fellowship and for library and computer facilities, and Cambridge University Press, Wiley-Blackwell and other publishers acknowledged individually for permission to use copyright material. Julia Koppitz of HarperCollins and the production team, especially David Price-Goodfellow and Hugh Brazier of D & N Publishing, were a pleasure to work with, and deserve due credit for their contribution to the finished product. Last but not least, I am grateful to Janet Betts for encouraging me to finish this book, and for being ‘the wind beneath my wings’ while I did so. Responsibility for opinions expressed in the book, and for any errors or infelicities the reader may encounter, is my own. Writing this book has been a long haul, but an enjoyable one; it has taught me a lot, and reminded me of some things I had forgotten I ever knew. I hope my readers may find no less pleasure in reading it.
As this book goes to press, ash dieback disease (Chalara fraxinea) has just been confirmed in numerous counties. This fungal disease first appeared in Lithuania and east Poland in the 1990s, and has since devastated ashwoods over most of eastern, central and northern Europe. It could have as great an impact on our landscape as myxomatosis or Dutch elm disease, perhaps more so. We shall see its effects over the next few years.