This book tells the story of botany in South Yorkshire from the 16th to the late 20th century and complements the "South Yorkshire Plant Atlas" in providing additional and more detailed accounts of botanists, their lives and their work than was possible to include in the Plant Atlas, together with many illustrations of people, manuscripts, printed sources and herbarium sheets, as well as a comprehensive bibliography of the area's botanical literature.
The work also includes the first ever transcription of the "Flora Sheffieldiensis" of Jonathan Salt. This seminal work was compiled around 1800 and is of fundamental importance to the history of botany not only in Yorkshire, but also in Derbyshire, and was quoted extensively by F.A. Lees in his Flora of West Yorkshire. It is the earliest surviving comprehensive account of the flora, including the mosses, fungi, algae and lichens, of Sheffield and the surrounding area.
This book will appeal not only to those who botanise in Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, but also to those who wish to study the changes in the flora of these counties over the last 200 years and to those who have an interest in the history of natural history.