A Flora of California, Vol. 2 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from A Flora of California, Vol. 2

The first publication that may in a wide and rather loose use of the term be called a "flora" of the Californian area is the "California Supplement" (1838-1841) in Hooker and Arnott's Botany of Beechey's Voyage. In this Supplement are described the collections made by David Douglas during the years 1831 and 1832 in the Coast Ranges, chiefly in the central region. About five hundred and seventy-six species of vascular plants are listed. Some of these plants were obtained by other collectors and a few were gathered far northward beyond the present boundaries of California. In so early a day, the term California, extremely indefinite, was not infrequently compelled to do duty as far as the basin of the Snake River or the snowy volcanic peaks that look northward to the gorge of the Columbia River.

Several collections earlier than those of Douglas had been made in California. The La Perouse Expedition visited Monterey in 1786 but later perished in the South Seas. The botanist of the Malaspina Expedition, Thaddeus Haenke, collected around Monterey in 1791. A few of his California plants were published in Presl's Reliquiae Haenkeanae (1830-1831), but the greater part were destined to lie at Prague for many decades and over one hundred and forty years elapsed before the California collection was taken up as a whole for serious study. Archibald Menzies, botanist of Vancouver's Voyage, made at a half-dozen points along our coast line important collections at intervals from 1791 to 1795, but his plants, nearly all new, were published in a scattered manner by various authors, mostly one or two at a time, over a long period of years. The Russian Kotzebue Expedition visited San Francisco Bay in 1816 and small collections were made by the naturalists, Adelbert von Chamisso and Johann Friederich Eschscholtz. Chamisso's new California plants were not given to the botanical world separately but were published periodically in c…