About
In 1818, William P. C. Barton published his Compendium florae philadelphicae: containing a description of the indigenous and naturalized plants found within a circuit of ten miles around Philadelphia. The result of intensive fieldwork and herbarium study, it included 1,062 taxa, roughly 98% of which Barton personally collected. Digitized versions of Barton’s flora are available online (Volume 1.; Volume 2.)
Barton’s flora serves as a valuable time capsule of the species present in Philadelphia, and its immediate environs, at a precise moment in time. For those interested in understanding Philadelphia’s “native” flora, including gardeners, landscape designers, and ecologists, Barton’s work provides clear answers to two fundamental questions about a species’ nativity:
Native to where? Philadelphia and the immediately surrounding area
Native as of when? 1818, comparatively early in the course of the city’s urbanization
William P.C. Barton
To enhance Barton’s flora’s accessibility to contemporary users, the spreadsheet available for download here transcribes and translates Barton’s 1818 text into a searchable format. It also includes additional data fields that the user may find helpful.
Importantly, many of the scientific names used by Barton have since become obsolete. To address this, this tool provides the currently accepted Latin synonyms for Barton’s taxa. This was achieved through database searches, principally of Kew’s Plants of the World Online (POWO) and the World Flora Online Plant List (WFO), supplemented by extensive additional taxonomic research, plant descriptions, geographic distributions, and even common names. Each record in the spreadsheet includes these details, and a list of sources is provided for reference.
View the original digitized versions of Barton’s flora:
View the updated spreadsheet version of Barton’s flora:
