CLARKE, William A[mbrose]. First Records of British Flowering Plants.

The First Book of Floral Firsts

CLARKE, William A[mbrose]. First Records of British Flowering Plants. London: West, Newman & Co. 1897.

8vo. Original limp green boards, upper board lettered in gilt; pp. 103, [1]; joints lightly rubbed, some wear to spine ends; nonetheless a very good copy; 54 pp. twentieth-century annotation in blue ink.

First edition in book form of this history of floral discovery, with manuscript annotations denoting the locations of over fifty plant discoveries.

Most of what we know about the unsung William Ambrose Clark (1841–1911) comes from his obituary in the Journal of Botany by his fellow botanist James Britten. Clarke was a solicitor who retired to Oxford and used the Bodleian Library’s resources to fulfil his bibliographical approach to botanical science. This is his only published work and it shows, Britten comments, views on nomenclature that are ‘sentimental rather than logical’. It is, however, a significant achievement. ‘Until 1897, when William Clarke produced his First Records of British Flowering Plants, there was no publication where one could see the date and source of the discovery of all of the native plants in Britain and Ireland’ (Pearman).

Clarke’s assiduous work in listing the first recorded scientific description of each species of the native flora of Britain was initially published in sections in the Journal of Botany between 1892 and 1896. Here it appears complete, expanded, and amended for the first time. This first edition, due to its small print run, remains elusive compared to the second edition of 1900.

There are marginal notes to fifty-four of the pages. These are mainly in the form of one of ‘Bath’, ‘Bristol’, ‘Somerset’, or ‘Essex’, denoting when a plant was first identified in one of those locations, and perhaps apparently denoting the locality in which the plant was first identified and suggesting a particular interest on the part of the previous owner in the flora of these areas.

See Britten, ‘William Ambrose Clarke, 1841–1911’, Journal of Botany 49, pp, 167–69; Pearman, ‘Chronicling the discovery of the British and Irish native floras’, Archives of natural history, Volume 45, Issue 2.

SKU: 2124382