Co. Antrim, v.c. H39

Antrim has attracted many leading botanists over the years. The flora of the county has been described in Stewart & Corry’s Flora of the North-East of Ireland, covering the counties of Down, Antrim and Londonderry. The last edition of this Flora was edited by Paul Hackney and published in 1992.

Antrim is home to many rare plants and a previous County Recorder, Stan Beesley, published a Rare Plant Register in 2006.

Recording continues, albeit with relatively few contributors. Hopefully, some of you reading this will want to become part of the recording community. You can come along to a BSBI Ulster Botany Group field meeting, record plants on your home patch or get out and explore on your own. The number of species you record isn’t as important as the accuracy of your observations and the fun you have doing it. But your skills will certainly improve with practice. And the BSBI offers a wide range of training and support. Become a member and you will never look back.

Please contact David if you want to find out how to put your plant records on the map.

Don’t read on unless you are seriously interested in how the BSBI gathers plant records and how well we are doing in County Antrim.

There is one place where detailed information on the distribution of the plants of Britain and Ireland is painstakingly recorded. It is the BSBI database, and it is used to inform government, research and conservation bodies, to publish atlases for the public, to record the changes taking place in our countryside. Records are sent into the database from every corner of these islands - each field trip, each Sunday walk, everything counts.

Thanks to the recording community, common plants can now be mapped in more detail than ever before, and accurate GPS grid references are being logged for sites of rare plants. For Antrim alone, the BSBI database holds over 100,000 plant records.