Flora

As a Midland county with a variety of soils, Warwickshire has a comparatively rich wild flora. William Shakespeare, who grew up in the county, makes many references to the wildflowers with which he must have been familiar with, the best-known of which, from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, is:

“I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
Where ox-lips and the nodding violet grows;
Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.”

The diversity of wild plants includes trees and shrubs, herbaceous wildflowers, ferns, mosses and liverworts, lichens, fungi, stoneworts and algae. There are over 5,000 species known in Warwickshire, including nearly 1,800 types of wildflower. Some are native to the county, having arrived naturally after the last Ice Age, whilst others have been introduced accidentally or intentionally by man, and have established themselves as part of our natural flora. Yet other plants are of casual occurrence, appearing and persisting perhaps for a year or two but unable to survive in the conditions here. Rather too many of the once-known plants are now believed to be extinct because of habitat loss and changes in traditional land management.

Records of the distribution, status and abundance of the wild plants are kept in the Warwickshire Biological Record Centre. A number of books about Warwickshire Wild Plants are published and copies can be seen in Warwickshire Libraries. This includes the book Warwickshire’s Wildflowers produced by the museum in 2009. The Warwickshire Museum also cares for a fine herbarium of locally collected plant specimens.