The plant list of Sark

Sark measures around three and a half miles long by one and a half miles wide, and its plant list records 712 plants. Hold those two figures together for a moment. A piece of land you could shade with your thumb on a map of the Channel carries a recorded flora seven hundred entries deep, and every one of those entries got there because somebody found the plant, identified it and wrote it down.

The spreadsheet

The list itself is a spreadsheet, compiled by Susan Synnott. It runs to two columns, scientific name and then common name, ordered alphabetically by the scientific name, with the botanical names updated from Clive Stace’s New Flora of the British Isles, fourth edition, 2019. That updating matters more than it sounds. Botanical names shift as the science moves, and a county flora that stops being corrected quietly stops being true. This one is kept current against the standard reference.

Read down the columns and you find the marks of a working document. Nine entries carry no common name at all, only the Latin. Prickly Poppy appears twice, once against Argemone mexicana and once against Papaver argemone, exactly as recorded. Soft-brome and Curled Dock each repeat across subspecies. None of this has been smoothed away for publication, because the document exists to be right rather than to be neat.

The list’s own preamble states plainly what the 712 does and does not promise: most of the plants listed have specimens in the herbarium, some are very common, and others may not have been seen for many years. That sentence is worth more than a tidier claim would be. A count that admits which of its members might have slipped away is a count you can trust.

The herbarium in the Heritage Room

The pressed evidence behind the list sits in Sark’s Heritage Room. The herbarium there was begun by Marcia Marsden in 1980, is constantly updated, and now holds more than 550 specimens. A small library of reference books and specialist studies stands alongside it, available for visitors to browse whenever the Heritage Room is open. You can walk in off the lane and page through the same references the recorders use.

Who keeps the count

The recording continues season by season. Anne Haden, of La Société Jersiaise, is the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland’s plant recorder for Sark, and she visits the island regularly during the growing season. Sark’s own group also works with La Société Jersiaise and La Société Guernesiaise, whose members visit from time to time.

The botany section holds no separate formal outings of its own. Instead it links up with the island’s ornithology group for Sark Nature Week, usually held in April or early May, when botany walks led by wildflower enthusiasts cover a variety of habitats. Botanists and birdwatchers walking out together suits an island where the habitats sit minutes apart.

Why it matters when you visit

We publish the full list, all 712 entries, on our plants of Sark page, browsable from A to Z. For what you are likely to see in flower, and when, our wildflowers on Sark article covers the season on the ground.

Here is what the list changes for a visitor. The flowers in the hedgerow you pass on the way to the bay are on record. Somebody found them, named them, and in most cases pressed a specimen that now sits in a room you can visit the same afternoon. On an island around three and a half miles long, the distance between seeing a plant and finding its written record is a short walk, and few places anywhere let you close that loop before dinner.