You can download the Barton spreadsheet here, but please read below for important information on how to use it.
You can also see examples of gardens created using some of the species identified by Barton, and still growing wild in Philadelphia.
Background
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
To enhance Barton’s flora’s accessibility to contemporary users, this spreadsheet 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.
Using the tool
Every record in the spreadsheet tab labeled “The species” corresponds to a taxon listed in Barton’s 1818 flora, with the exception of duplicate entries, as explained below. Users can search for a species by its modern scientific or common names, provided in the first two columns of the spreadsheet. Users can also search and sort by additional columns that provide the species’ nativity status, relative to Philadelphia, according to The Biota of North America Program (BONAP), as well as data from several additional contemporary sources (all detailed in the spreadsheet tab labeled “Column definitions”). Column G, “Lepidopteran species richness (Narango),” may be of particular interest to users as it captures the number of Lepidoptera species (moths, butterflies and skippers) that a given plant genus has been documented to host in Pennsylvania. This serves as a useful proxy for a species’ role in supporting the local ecosystem.
Columns H – O, highlighted in blue, contain the original data from Barton’s flora. The column labeled “Narrative description” is often particularly interesting and useful, frequently offering a detailed description of a taxon’s distribution and habitat as of 1818.
In certain instances, multiple taxa described by Barton are now classified under a single species name. In such cases, duplicate records are eliminated, but Barton’s descriptive data for those duplicates is preserved and added in columns W– AE.
In his plant distribution descriptions, Barton often mentions a small set of key landmarks, some of which still exist today. To help users better understand these descriptions, the spreadsheet tab labeled “Maps” pinpoints these landmarks on a map of the area. Additionally, it includes geological information from Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, which can be valuable for determining suitable planting locations and conditions. The tab also provides descriptions of the different bedrock types in the region.
The spreadsheet tab labeled “Notes” includes several pertinent notes made by Barton in the preface or within the text. It also contains a list of taxa referenced by Barton, typically in the indices, but not included in the main body of the text (and therefore not included in the spreadsheet). Additionally, it lists several other taxa excluded from the spreadsheet for various reasons, as explained in the notes.
Users are strongly encouraged to perform their own additional research on the taxa listed by Barton, and the sources provided in the spreadsheet’s “Sources” tab are a good starting point. An asterisk (*) appended to the scientific name in column A denotes a Barton taxon whose contemporary synonym was particularly difficult to ascertain. Users may want to exercise particular caution in interpreting these entries.
As Wherry (1968) observed, some of Barton’s observations are curious, especially the abundance of species he recorded that appear to be substantially north of their known range limits. Those may be due to mis-identification, but users are encouraged to interpret those anomalous results for themselves.
Feedback
While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this tool, some errors are virtually inevitable. For inquiries about the data or to report errors, please contact Seth Budick at sbudick@gmail.com.