to observe, so botanical discoveries were continuing at an even pace. Belfastman John Templeton, (1766–1825) who furthered the cause of Irish botany more than any other, and was described by Praeger as the most eminent naturalist that Ireland ever produced, completed his manuscript Catalogue of the Native Plants of Ireland in 1801 – now in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. Unfortunately, he failed to realise his ambition of producing an elaborate Hibernian Flora that would have drawn from his Catalogue and embodied new records together with colour illustrations. The remaining manuscript, including some fine watercolour drawings by Templeton himself, is little more than a skeleton with some volumes now missing. It resides in the Ulster Museum, Belfast.
Templeton was quite content to live in Northern Ireland, working diligently on both the flora and fauna, with little ambition to travel abroad despite a tempting offer from the British botanist Sir Joseph Banks to go to New Holland (Australia), ‘with a good salary and a large grant of land’.2 Templeton published very little but maintained an active correspondence with many eminent British naturalists such as William Hooker, Dawson Turner, James Sowerby and Lewis Dillwyn (who also visited Ireland), many of whom published his records.
The first national flora was The Irish Flora Comprising the Phaenogramous Plants and Ferns, published anonymously in 1833.60 Katherine Sophia Baily (1811–86), later Lady Kane and wife of Sir Robert Kane, was the reputed author at the tender age of 22. John White of the National Botanic Gardens is acknowledged in the preface as having supplied the localities for plants. Three years later James Townsend Mackay (1775?—1862), a Scot who had been appointed Curator of the Trinity College Botanic Garden at Ball’s Bridge in 1806, brought forth Flora Hibernica,61 a much more substantial and scholarly work which ambitiously encompassed both phanerogams (seed-bearing plants) and cryptogams (those that do not produce seeds) of the entire island in one work. The book was a joint effort, despite no acknowledgement on the title page – the other contributors are acknowledged later in the text – between William Henry Harvey (1811–66) who was responsible for the section on algae and Thomas Taylor (d.1848) who wrote the sections on mosses, liverworts and lichens while Mackay dealt with the flowering plants, ferns and stoneworts.
Turner’s Muscologiae Hibernicae (1804). Although originating from England the book is well grounded on Irish data.
One of the few specially illustrated title pages for Baily’s Irish Flora (1833).
The British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831, was based, in the words of social historian David Allen, ‘ostensibly on the model of a similar perambulatory body started nine years before in Germany’. Apart from providing the natural history world as a whole with a usual annual meeting ground and forum, the B.A. helped these studies in a more practical way by making grants-in-aid.62 The B.A. provided enormous stimulus to the development of regional and local natural histories by holding its regional meetings throughout Britain and Ireland. The 1843 Association meeting was held in Cork and to mark the event the Cuvierian Society of Cork published a small volume of ‘communications’ entitled Contributions Towards a Fauna and Flora of the County of Cork.63 John D. Humphreys (fl. 1843) prepared the lists of molluscs, crustaceans and echinoderms; J.R. Harvey (fl. 1843) wrote on the vertebrates while Thomas Power (fl. 1845) was responsible for the section ‘The Botanist’s Guide for the County of Cork’ – one of the first local floras in Ireland.
Twenty years after the publication of the Cork regional flora came Flora Belfastiensis in 1863.64 Its author, Ralph Tate (1840–1901), hoped that it might be of use to the botanical members of the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club which had been founded as an enthusiastic response to his series of lectures delivered at the Belfast School of Science. Tate, born in Britain, was only resident in Belfast for three years after which he travelled widely, ending up as Professor of geology at Adelaide, Australia. Another similar product was the small, slim volume A Flora of Ulster,65 published the following year by George Dickie (1812–82), and offered as a ‘Collectanea’ towards a more comprehensive flora of the North of Ireland. Dickie’s view of Ulster was definitely expansionist for he included parts of Connacht in the surveyed localities. Both Flora Belfastiensis and A Flora of Ulster consisted of a list of species accompanied with notes on their habitats and distribution.
A departure from the presentation of traditional floras came with the publication in 1866 of Cybele Hibernica66 by David Moore (1807–79) and Alexander Goodman More (1830–95). When living in England, More had worked with H.C. Watson who devised, for Cybele Britannica (1847–59)67 a scheme of 18 ‘provinces’ that were later split into 112 ‘vice-counties’, a first move towards the recording of plant distribution on a quantitative basis. This was the ancestor of the dot distribution maps showing the presence or absence of a species within a grid of 10 km squares, now the internationally accepted grid recording system.
The division of Ireland into 12 ‘districts’ (based mostly on county boundaries) and 37 ‘vice-counties’ was originally proposed by Charles Babington (1808–95), Professor of Botany at Cambridge, in a paper presented to the Dublin University Zoological and Botanical Association in 1859.68 More, quick to see the advantages of such a scheme, adopted the 12 ‘districts’ for Ireland for his compilation of Cybele Hibernica. Plants now had a framework in which they could be recorded; their distribution could be compared region for region over time.
Such was the success of Cybele Hibernica that a supplement followed in 1872 and a second edition of the book in 1898.69 In 1896, shortly before the second edition, Robert Lloyd Praeger (see here) proposed an even more fine-grained recording net of 40 ‘divisions’ or ‘vice-counties’ (each an average 813 km2) based on the 32 administrative counties that comprised all Ireland.70 The new divisions were used in his monumental Irish Topographical Botany,71 published in 1900, the product of 35 years of active botanising, and have been adopted, subject to minor modifications, as the standard botanical recording units of Ireland. The distribution of plant records in the most recent 1987 Census Catalogue of the Flora of Ireland by Scannell & Synnott are referenced on Praeger’s 40 botanical ‘divisions’.72
The Rev. Thomas Allin (d?1909) served in several parishes in Ireland – Cork, Galway and Carlow – but apparently ‘botanised’ only in Co. Cork, when he possibly had more available time, and where he gathered his records for the Flowering Plants and Ferns of the County Cork (1883).73 He divided the county into two parts, shown on the book’s coloured frontispiece, which bore no correspondence to the system adopted in Cybele Hibernica. Allin was a careful recorder and listed 700 flowering plants and ferns together with notes on their distribution. In his preface he pays tribute to Isaac Carroll (1828–80), one of the best botanists in the county at the time. The extent of Carroll’s contribution to Allin’s flora is not known but it may have been substantial. The amount of information Allin published was a marked advance on Power’s earlier flora of Cork.
Botanical sub-divisions of Ireland based on vice -counties with the 100 km lines of the National Grid. The sub-zone letters are also given; each sub-zone is a particular 100 km square of the National Grid: B=14, C=24, D=34, F=03, G=13, H=23, J=33, L=02, M=12, N=22, 0=32, Q=01, R=11, S=21, T=31, V=00, W=10, X=20, Y=30. From Scannell & Synnott72.
From the bubbling crucible of Northern Ireland arose A Flora of the North-east of Ireland (1888)74 by Samuel Alexander Stewart (1826–1910) and Thomas Corry (1860–83). Stewart, an errand boy at 11 and later a trunk maker, played the leading role in founding the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club in 1863. He was one of a select band of ‘working-men naturalists’ who transcended the social barriers and joined in with middle class hunters of flowers and plants. In