THE EUROPEAN GARDEN FLORA
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
DOI: 10.17660/ActaHortic.1986.182.25
https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.1986.182.25