Description
PREFACEMENTS
ALMOST two hundred years have passed since John Sibthorp, John Hawkins
and Ferdinand Bauer landed at Larnaca to begin the first scientific survey of
Cyprian plants. Since then a succession of travellers and resident collectors
have shown that the fields, forests and mountains of Cyprus shelter an
unusually interesting and varied flora. In this respect, the absence from
Cyprus of several species, widespread and locally common elsewhere in the
eastern Mediterranean, is of no less scientific interest to phyto-geographers
than the presence of numerous endemics, including the remarkably isolated
Bosea cypria. But, until now, students of the Cyprus flora, and of Mediter-
ranean floristics as a whole, have been handicapped by the lack of a compre-
hensive, up-to-date, descriptive account of the island’s plants, and have had,
perforce, to fall back for guidance on Boissier’s Flora Orientalis or Post’s
Flora of Syria, Palestine and Sinai, works which, however excellent, cannot
be regarded as very complete or convenient when put to this more restricted
Holmboe’s Studies on the Vegetation of Cyprus (Bergen, 1914), an
outstandingly accurate and painstaking compilation, was never intended as a
Flora, and in the absence of keys and descriptions, was useful only to those
who were already well acquainted with the flora of the region, or who had
access to the major European herbaria. The foresters alone have been
better served: Mrs Esther F. Chapman’s Cyprus Trees and Shrubs (Nicosia,
1949) deals very ably and exhaustively with the trees and woody plants of the
island; indeed, the main object of the present work has been to supplement
this, and to provide an equal measure of guidance for those who are as much
concerned with the herbaceous as with the ligneous element in the Cyprus
flora. Volume I accomplishes roughly half this task; the whole work, it is
hoped, will be completed in a second volume.
use.
The practical importance of a descriptive Flora, whether of Cyprus or of
any other part of the World, cannot be overstressed. Everywhere (and very
patently in parts of Cyprus), disregard for the vulnerability of the Earth’s
mantle of vegetation has led to impoverishment, erosion and desolation.
Only now is positive action being taken to halt the progress of destruction,
and to restore, as far as is possible, former verdure and fertility. Progress in
this direction inevitably calls for a sound and detailed knowledge of the plants
involved, for the science of Conservation, like every other science, can succeed
only if it is based upon a foundation of established fact. It is hoped that this
volume, and its successor, will be found to provide this essential basis.
J. P. M. BRENAN
Director, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
