THE EUROPEAN GARDEN FLORA

Horticulturists and botanists show very different approaches to the basic problem of plant identification, and their attitudes depend very much on whether plants are wild or cultivated. The result is a current lack of comprehensive and accurate reference works with which to identify plants cultivated for amenity, with consequent misidentification of plants and misuse of names in gardens and in the horticultural trade. To fill this need, the European Garden Flora, a manual for the identification of plants cultivated in Europe, both out-of-doors and under glass, is currently being produced under the direction of an editorial committee of horticulturists and botanists, advised by experts from all over Europe. Written like a conventional wild Flora, with keys and descriptions, it will enable the user to identify plants available commercially or commonly found in european gardens. By early 1986, two out of the planned six volumes will have been published, covering the Pteridophytes, Gymnosperms and Monocotyledons, 'though future progress may be slower due to problems with funding.

The difference in approach to plant identification shown by horticulturists on one hand and botanists on the other is often a consequence of the circumstances in which members of these two professions first become acquainted with plants. Horticulturists tend to work from the plant to the book, learning to recognise the whole living plant by experience sometimes mixed with a smattering of intuition, while botanists often work in the reverse direction from the book to the plant, learning the characters of family, genus and species, and then applying this knowledge to plants both dried and living. Both approaches have their strengths and their weaknesses, and the expertise of most good plantsmen is a skillful blend of the two. This difference is further emphasised by their attitudes to where a particular plant is growing. Is it wild or is it cultivated? In 1972, the Royal Horticultural Society and the Botanical Society of the British Isles jointly organised a conference called Plants Wild and Cultivated. The preface to the conference proceedings (Green, 1973) opens with this comment: "It is a strange fact that those who are interested in native floras, especially professional botanists often ignore plants cultivated in gardens. Conversely, gardeners tend to pay little heed to plants which are wild, unless they happen to be weeds"

This regretable dichotomy is nowhere more apparent than in the field of horticultural reference works, especially those concerned