On my fifteenth birthday I was given a copy of the publishing sensation of the year: W. Keble Martin’s The Concise British Flora. I cannot remember whether I had asked for it or whether it was my parents’ idea. I wasn’t especially interested in wild flowers just then. My thing was butterflies and moths. But there it was, already in its fourth impression, and it changed my life.
I was roughly the 100,000th person to own a ‘Keble Martin’. By 1980 another million-and-a-half people had joined me. The reason so many of us bought it was that this was a different kind of field guide to any that had gone before. It was the first book printed for a mass market that illustrated nearly every species of wild flower accurately, in colour, and at more or less life-size (trees were represented by leaves and twigs). The flowers were carefully arranged on each plate, often overlapping, in a way that was uncannily lifelike. Pale flowers were shown against green foliage, as in a hedgerow. ‘The draughtsman’s aim,’1 explained the author in his old-fashioned way, ‘has been to show an average fragment [of a plant], with its essential features, and to give each a place in the sun without crowding.’ In their exquisite detail Martin’s drawings resembled the past masters of flower illustration, but, unlike theirs, his pictures were available to all at thirty-five bob, or £1.75. The Concise British Flora was a labour of love that had taken this dutiful and preoccupied vicar the best part of his lifetime to complete.
I used Keble Martin to tick off wild flowers as I found them – to me, it was a good way of learning them. Fifty years on, my tattered copy is annotated with dates and places in much the same way as Martin himself had labelled his sketches. Beginning with Plate 1, Meadow Rues and Anemones, I see that I ticked my first Alpine Meadow Rue on Ben Lawers in the Scottish Highlands during a family holiday in July 1969. The most luscious flower on the plate, Pasqueflower, had to wait until a spring walk on Aston Upthorpe Down, Oxfordshire, in 1985. And I didn’t see the now nearly-extinct Pheasant’s Eye, whose intense red flowers lent it its old name of ‘red Morocco’, until July 2012, in a ‘cornfield near Dunsden, Oxon’. Ticking became a habit. Many of Keble’s 100 plates now have a near-complete set of ticks. But, especially towards the back of the book, among the grasses, sedges and rushes, there were many gaps. I used to brood over those gaps. Not all the missing plants were rare. Some were species I might have walked straight past, unrecognised – there were plenty of those among such lookalike groups as chickweeds, eyebrights and forget-me-nots.
When I found a new flower I would check its likeness on the page and then double-check it against Keble Martin’s terse text notes opposite. When I first opened Keble I hardly knew a daisy from a dandelion. With his help, I was soon able to sort out buttercups, umbellifers (they look tricky, but are in fact quite easy) and eventually even those problematic lookalikes, the ‘yellow composites’. I graduated to plants without colourful flowers, to sedges, pondweeds and even grasses – which, since they are all shades of green, Keble had left as uncoloured drawings. As I delved deeper into the world of plants. I learned that nearly every species has its own ‘look’, a kind of botanical personality – its ‘jizz’, as they used to say. In the process I learned the names of parts, like ‘umbel’, ‘sepal’ and ‘cyme’; understood that an ‘arcuate’ stem is one bent like a bow, and that a ‘lanceolate’ leaf is one shaped like a spear-point. Botanical jargon might seem arcane and unnecessary, but it enables a plant to be described precisely, stripped down to its component parts for the purposes of identification. With the help of such words, I learned to tell the difference between very similar-looking plants, not just from the details of the flowers, but also their leaves (are they ‘lanceolate’ or ‘cordate’?), their seed-heads or their sepals (are they hairy or are they reflexed?). Botanical terms aren’t difficult to learn, and they enable you to use the keys in a field guide or flora. Without them, a buttercup will probably always remain a buttercup, and not a Creeping one, or a Bulbous one, or a Small-flowered one. Your delight in buttercups will remain generalised, and not specific.
Why, in general, aren’t more of us interested in wild flowers? After all, they are all around us, even in a city, and their colours make a powerful, if easily underrated, contribution to the beauty of the landscape. They have wonderful names and intriguing back-stories and, unlike garden flowers, they don’t cost anything (seeing beauty in a weed can change your life – and the way you garden). We should love and cherish them more, and in Keble Martin’s boyhood, a century ago, people did. Wild flowers have retreated in the public consciousness since then. At least a million of us are sufficiently interested in birds to take out a subscription to the RSPB. But the equivalent charity, Plantlife, has to struggle along with just 1 per cent of that number.
This made the rapid ascent to best-seller status of The Concise British Flora all the more surprising. Who was he, this man who, accidentally, almost unintentionally, created a surge in wild-flower awareness? By the time his book appeared, he was nearing the end of a long and busy life. William Keble Martin was born halfway through the reign of Queen Victoria, in 1877, the son of the rector of Staverton in Devon. He was a comfortable member of the educated upper-middle-class, a scion of a large West Country family with connections to Winchester College and the patriarchal home at Overbury Park in Gloucestershire. Among his siblings and cousins were vicars and deans, naval captains and engineers, schoolmasters and architects. A boyhood spent in rural surroundings in Devon and Wiltshire nurtured his love of the outdoors. The young Keble spent his holidays walking and camping on the moors, bird-nesting in the hedgerows and pressing plants in a book. He learned to shoot, and to ice-skate, not on a rink but on a frozen pond near the house. More unusually, he was interested in mosses. He collected and reared butterflies and moths and, indeed, it was ‘the desire to know2 their foodplants’, he explained, ‘that first promoted the effort to identify the plants required’. At Oxford University he read an unconventional mixture of Greek philosophy and botany. But there was never any doubt about his vocation, and it wasn’t botany. Naturally religious, with an evangelical bent, Keble Martin was ordained, like his father, and spent the rest of his life in the service of the Church of England.
He was that now near-vanished species, a naturalist who was interested in everything, or (as he put it) in ‘all branches of natural history’. While at Oxford he learned to draw flowers mainly because ‘fellow students complained of the difficulty of identifying them from the long, wordy descriptions in works then available’. In 1899, aged twenty-one, he made the very first drawing for what would become The Concise British Flora: a snowdrop highlighted against a leaf of ivy – the only drawing in the book to bring in a fragment of a different plant.
In those days, when photography was still cumbersome and monochrome, painting wild flowers was a popular hobby. One way of learning them was to ‘paint in your Bentham’ – the standard handbook of the day, by George Bentham and Joseph Dalton Hooker, which included a set of drawings printed on strong paper suitable for watercolours. These drawings, by William Hood Fitch, set a lasting example to Keble Martin by always including the date and locality where the plant had been gathered.
In the 1920s a Wildflower Society was formed, of which Keble Martin was a keen member. It encouraged its members not only to draw and paint flowers, but to keep a diary of all the species they found. After reaching a certain level of proficiency, members could be promoted to the Society’s higher echelon, which was called, with romantic whimsy, ‘Valhalla’, and then, beyond that, to ‘Parnassus’, the Garden of the Gods. The select few who grazed the verdant lawns of Parnassus would be expected to have coloured in most of their Benthams. They now dwelled in the airy spaces reserved for those of uncommon attainment.
Keble Martin, funnily enough, would not have qualified for Parnassus, and perhaps not even for Valhalla. Forever busy with parochial matters, he never learned to drive and had a large family to support. He went botanising only where he could and when he could find the time. Many of the scarcer plants he painted were brought to him by friends, or even resuscitated from dried, pressed specimens. Perhaps the first rare flower he ever painted was the Heath Lobelia, Lobelia urens on his Plate 54, which he discovered at a ‘strong new locality’ at Yarner Wood in Devon, and first drew for the Journal of Botany in 1901. Earlier that year he had also painted Mossy Saxifrage, ‘a mass of flower3 like a white tablecloth’, which he had come across during a walking holiday in the Brecon Beacons. While serving as curate at Ashbourne in the Peak District a few years later, he spotted the rare Jacob’s Ladder on the steep bank of Bentley Brook, and took a sprig for painting later, ‘my fiancée4 holding me by an ankle to prevent my falling’.
By 1906 he had conceived his ambition to paint the entire British flora, including that of Ireland and the Channel Islands. At that time it consisted of around 1,400 native or well-established species. His principal guide was the London Catalogue of British Plants, which was marked off into 100 sections, each with about fifteen plants. ‘This method,’5 he noted, ‘led almost unawares to the plotting of the 100 plates of the Concise British Flora.’ Perhaps for reasons of space, he decided against including ferns and their allies in the project. His flora would consist entirely of flowering plants, except for a single plate showing the three native conifers: Scots pine, yew and juniper. His modus operandi was to place a drawing in the corner of each plate and fill the rest of the space with related species as he found them. This required many rethinks, as he worked over and over to fit drawings on the same plate without overcrowding. For some species, fruits, as well as flowers, had to be drawn; and, for difficult groups, magnifications of other diagnostic features: florets, capsules, stamens. Each drawing had to include everything necessary to identify the plant. And they would all have to be done at approximately life-size – which meant, of course, that in many cases the whole plant could not be shown, only a representative sprig of blossom or catkins. A pair of acorns and a leaf were sufficient for the Pedunculate Oak.
By 1932, by which time he was fifty-four, married and with four grown-up children, Keble Martin had completed about half of ‘the 1,480 figures proposed’. Some he needed to replace because the original paper had discoloured. Always a perfectionist, he repainted many more after discovering a superior grade of green paint. Some of the more elusive flowers were painted on ‘little holidays’, such as his family’s excursion to The Lizard in 1923, to Berry Head in 1924, to Upper Teesdale in 1927 and to Ben Lawers in 1933. It was at the last named that Martin famously ‘walked miles6 in mountain mist and rain to restore a small rare plant to its own niche’; the plant was Drooping Saxifrage, Saxifraga cernua, which at that time was known only from Ben Lawers. For his plate of lookalike fumitories (Plate 6, one of his best), he was able to enlist the services of the acknowledged authority, H. W. Pugsley – himself no mean botanical artist – and tour Cornwall in Pugsley’s car. More usually Martin travelled by rail or on his ‘lightless auto-bike’. For those plants that still remained out of reach, he relied on friends. Over five decades, eighty-two botanists sent him 360 specimens, a tribute to the generosity and fellowship that still lives on in botanical circles.
Keble Martin retired in 1949, aged seventy-two, moving to a bungalow near Chagford on the edge of Dartmoor – always his favourite corner of Britain. With increased leisure, but now in intermittent ill-health, he repainted or rearranged many of the older pictures whilst slotting in the last remaining plants as he found them, including Common Spike-rush, Eleocharis palustris, which he picked on a walk in Dovedale in 1952. The very last plate to be completed was the one chosen for the book’s jacket: an arrangement of wild roses ‘redrawn after kind criticism of N. Y. Sandwith’. The full set of plates was exhibited at the Royal Horticultural Society in 1958. Everyone who saw them agreed on their consistently outstanding quality. The Society’s President, Sir David Bowes-Lyon, headed an appeal for funds to get them published.
The publication of botanical art was then an expensive business. Gorgeous pictures printed by lithography in limited editions were affordable only by wealthy collectors or institution libraries. The mass-production of all-colour field guides was still in its infancy and, as far as wild flowers were concerned, the results had been decidedly unimpressive. The standard-setter was the Collins Field Guide to Wild Flowers by David McClintock and R. S. Fitter, first published in 1956. The text, with its Michelin star-system (great rarities such as Ghost Orchid merited three stars), was excellent, but the drawings were not much of an advance on Bentham and Hooker, and they were separated from the text, in a bank of plates. The only really good published pictures then available were the Drawings of British Plants by Stella Ross-Craig, but they were not coloured and were of more use to specialists working in a herbarium than to amateur botanists in the field. The only other recourse of enthusiastic amateurs was to wrestle with the scientific descriptions in the standard flora by A. R. Clapham, T. G. Tutin and E. F. Warburg; but, good as it was, it was not intended for beginners.
Martin’s work was offered to seven publishers, one after the other, and they all turned it down. The pictures would be impossible to reproduce, they said, at an affordable price to anything like the required standard; it was a pity, but it just couldn’t be done – sorry. Then the Duke of Edinburgh got to hear of it and asked to see them. He, too, was impressed, but another year went by until his equerry, David Checketts, decided to show them to George Rainbird, who was a pioneer of a new kind of publishing – book packaging. He specialised in illustrated books, often printed outside Britain, at presses where the quality of colour printing was high and the prices more reasonable. He also reduced costs by putting together large print-runs – getting publishers and book clubs all around the world to club together to achieve economies of scale. He is said to have taken one look at Keble Martin’s plates and exclaimed, ‘Every schoolboy will want one!’ With Rainbird’s know-how, allied to his absolute faith in the broad appeal of this book, the unit costs of production began to come down. This kind of illustrated book – a ‘coffee-table book’ in more recent parlance – was his forte; Rainbird had already made cheaply printed successes out of Beautiful Butterflies and Birds of Heath and Marshland, which had cost just twelve shillings each. Keble Martin’s more delicate work was more demanding. Rainbird had to put together a print-run of 25,000 copies to achieve a retail price of thirty-five shillings (the equivalent price today would be £27). Prince Philip helped things along by penning a foreword praising the ‘dedicated and painstaking skill which has gone into each plate’.
The Concise British Flora in Colour was published in May 1965 by Ebury Press, a subsidiary of the National Magazine Company owned by Michael Joseph (and now part of Random House). It sold out in four months. By the following Christmas the book had been reprinted four times. By 1980 one-and-a-half million copies had been sold all over the world. Despite the ponderous title (but, even so, a better one than Martin’s first thought, ‘Comparative Figures of British Flora’), it was the greatest success of George Rainbird’s long career.
By now a widower, Martin remarried in 1965 and presented his bride with all the original coloured drawings, the work of a lifetime. ‘What greater proof of my devotion could I give?’ he said.
The retiring and now retired vicar, aged eighty-eight, was suddenly famous. He was honoured with a science doctorate at Exeter University. Hatchards bookshop flung a party for their ‘author of the year’. He was invited to design a set of stamps for the Post Office. And he wrote an autobiography7, Over the Hills, described by Wilfred Blunt as a work ‘of quiet charm – the sort of book to be read at ease in a deck-chair in a garden full of Madonna lilies and delphiniums’. He died at home in Woodbury, Devon, on 26th November 1969, aged ninety-two and lies in the local churchyard.
The Concise British Flora isn’t perfect. Although the colour printing was remarkably good for its time, there was some loss of definition and a slight colour distortion, which grew worse as the book was reprinted. And, as the historian and naturalist David Allen has remarked, Martin’s taxonomy was ‘rather noticeably8 out of date’, and the short descriptions of the text ‘too meagre for comfort’. There were mistakes (the Lizard Orchid doesn’t flower in May), corrected in later editions, which added more naturalised species and widespread hybrids. But the drawings still stand up well to modern field guides. Keble Martin did not have room – and perhaps not the material, either – to reproduce every species. I totted up9 nearly 200 species described in the text that he was unable to illustrate, including eleven sedges, twenty-eight grasses, seven lady’s-mantles and, more surprisingly, seven orchids (including the Ghost Orchid). There are even a few species that he forgot to include, such as Norwegian Mugwort, Alpine Coltsfoot, Mat-grass Fescue, Hairy Lady’s-mantle, Alchemilla monticola, and Vigur’s Eyebright, Euphrasia vigursii.
Some of the drawings – and this is not really a criticism – are not an exact match for the living plant. Martin had made subtle changes to make identification easier. Take the orchids, where the spikes of flowers are looser than you usually find in the wild, so that the structure of each individual flower can be better appreciated. Many lanky plants were cut short to fit the space. And, of course, his trees and shrubs are minimal: his stand-in for sycamore is a simple double-winged seed; his alder, a mere catkin.
Modest to the last, Keble Martin would have been the first to acknowledge the book’s shortcomings. As he noted in the last line of his short, rather formal preface, ‘we hope that the plates may have a chance of speaking for themselves. The author is very conscious of their limitations.’
My original plan had been simple: I wanted to find and tick every plant in Keble Martin. But I soon realised that the task was impossible. As early as Plate 5, I found a plant that no longer exists wild in Britain, the Violet Horned-poppy, last seen in a Suffolk chicken-run sixty years ago. Martin included this and other vanished species because they were illustrated in the Victorian floras he grew up with: in Bentham and Hooker, and in the London Catalogue of British Plants. Contrariwise, there are other plants that Martin did not include because he did not know of their existence, including recent discoveries such as Radnor Lily and Suffolk Lungwort.
My new plan was to see all the native wild plants found in Britain, including ferns, but to ignore the ‘introductions’. I would also ignore ‘critical’ plants such as the brambles and hawkweeds, on the grounds that they are far too difficult and not proper species anyway (they are usually described as ‘micro-species’). I also decided to omit species found only in Ireland or the Channel Islands, on the grounds that they are not really British, but Irish or French respectively. Even so, this still left around 1,500 species, including those, like the common Field Poppy, that might not be strictly native but which had certainly been in the landscape for hundreds of years. Had anyone, I wondered, managed to see them all? A few luminaries of the past seem to have done so. George Claridge Druce (1850–1932) was probably one of them, for I had examined his herbarium, in Oxford, and found a sheet of an entrancingly dim little plant called Guernsey Centaury, Exaculum pusillum, on which Druce had written: ‘my last plant’. What satisfaction those words must have given him! David McClintock is also said to have seen every native plant. Richard Fitter, doyen of field guides written in the 1950s and 1960s, told me he had too, so long as you discount the hawkweeds and the more ephemeral garden escapes known as ‘casuals’. Perhaps there are today a few quiet, modest souls who have twitched the whole lot. If there are, I feel appropriately humble.
I got out my battered old copy of The Concise British Flora and counted the native plants without a tick. To my surprise, it came to a round number: exactly fifty. Fifty un-ticked species. How hard could it be to find all those in a year? Quite hard, on closer inspection. There were good reasons why I had never found those fifty. A few are plants that flower erratically, while others are found only in remote corners of Britain, and some bloom underwater. Finding them all would require a lot of travel. It might in some cases demand a degree of personal fitness. Well, I thought, I can swim and climb a bit, and still walk up a hill without collapsing in a wheezing heap. I hoped that would be sufficient. More problematic was that some of them flowered at the same time at opposite ends of Britain. Just how badly did I want to do this? Was it any more than a passing whim? Was it going to be worth the trouble, for that small inner satisfaction?
I made a table of flowering times and places, and began to work out a rough itinerary. I called it The Quest. But over the whole enterprise hung the spectre of Epipogium, the Ghost Orchid – a plant almost as unobtainable as the Holy Grail. Unless someone found it during the year, which, on recent form, seemed unlikely, it was a built-in guarantee of almost certain failure. Its non-availability haunted the whole project. It was impossible. But all the same, having thought about it, and imagining where The Quest would take me, I wanted to try.