Plants
Plants are at the base of most food chains on Earth and most life is therefore directly or indirectly dependent upon them. As humans, in addition to our food, we have endless uses for plants. Many of these uses are hidden in modern living and can be quite surprising.
We start the day using them in soaps, shampoos, toothpastes, cosmetics and perfumes. When we dress we use them in clothes made from cotton, linen (flax), hemp, ramie, silk and viscose. Our newspapers and books are made from wood pulp (mainly Eucalyptus) and our money is printed on reprocessed rags made up of hemp, flax and cotton. We live and work in buildings constructed using wooden beams, floorboards, plywood and fibreboard. Whether we travel by bike, train, car or aeroplane, latex from the rubber tree has been used as a vital component of the tyres or wheel surrounds. Plants played a role in the formation of much of our non-renewable energy sources such as oil and coal and now they provide renewable energy solutions through biomass power stations and bio-diesel. Even in our recreation we find plants being used. In photography plant cellulose is used in photographic film, in sport we see cricket bats made of willow, the stumps from the ash, wooden golf-club heads from the persimmon tree and golf balls coated with latex tapped from the balata tree. In music the ‘reed’ mouthpieces in oboes and clarinets are collected from the Arundo reed in the south of France, and string instruments rely heavily on spruce, sycamore and maple wood. Finally, we use plants for our health, whether by taking Echinacea to prevent illness or in the medicines we take to treat illness. One in four of all the prescription drugs dispensed by our local chemists are likely to contain ingredients derived from plants. Plants have in fact given our modern western pharmacopoeia some 7,000 different medical compounds.
So conserving plant biodiversity on a global scale has very far reaching effects both for humans and other living organisms. We can all contribute towards plant biodiversity conservation on this scale through making informed consumer choices. On a local scale one good starting point is to find out more about your local flora which you can do through this website. Plants are extremely diverse and to understand our local flora we need to first put it into context.
Green plants existed before animals walked the earth. They now constitute an independent group of living organisms equal in rank to animals and fungi. The group includes green algae (such as those found in freshwater streams, ponds, and lakes) and land plants. Land plants are a group which consist of seed plants, ferns, horsetails, lycopods and bryophytes (mosses, liverworts and hornworts). The oldest fossils of land plants are 480 million years old, however recent developments in DNA research have revealed that land plants may have started evolving as long as 700 million years ago.
Seed plants is a group which includes flowering plants, ginkgos, conifers and cycads. There are currently an estimated 422,000 flowering plant species worldwide including orchids, palms, grasses, poppies, buttercups, proteas, mistletoe, saxifrages, leguminous plants, brassicas, the carnivorous sundrew family, the nightshade family, gentians, daisies and water lilies.
The ‘New Flora of the British Isles’ describes 4,500 taxa (species, sub species and hybrids) including flowering plants, conifers, ferns, horsetails and lycopods either native to or naturalised in this part of the world. In addition, there are c.1,195 species of bryophytes in Britain and Ireland.
The Yorkshire Dales National Park is famous for its wildlflowers. The following pages present numerous examples of some common, some less common and some rare plants which can be seen in the Dales, grouped by their habitats. Click on the buttons at the top of this page for more information about these habitats and examples of plant species found in the Yorkshire Dales.
Websites:
Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (opens in new window)
The National Non-food Crop Centre (opens in new window)
The Gymnosperm database (opens in new window)
The Cycad pages (opens in new window)
The Gingko pages (opens in new window)
Fern World WW (opens in new window)
British Bryological Society (opens in new window)
Other sources of information:
Rose, F (2006) The Wild Flower Key – How to identify wild flowers, trees and shrubs in Britain and Ireland London: Frederick Warne
Stace, C (1997) New Flora of the British Isles (2nd Ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Lewington, A (1990) Plants for People. London: The Natural History Museum
Balick, M J & Alan Cox, P (1997) Plants, People, and Culture – The Science of Ethnobotany New York: Scientific American Library
