wild flowers in fife & kinross - Fife Coast and Countryside Trust

introduced into a wide variety of situations of late, whether they be in amenity areas,
by walks and tracks, in borders, plots and verges, by car parks, utilised for screening
and so on.
Some have already appeared well away from their source and in a few years in some
parts it will be difficult to tell just what was originally planted and what has come in
on its own. Where to draw the line is a problem: taking an overall view, only a
comparatively small selection has been mentioned here, mainly those already found
as self-sown. But others will follow ....
Recording Methods and Terms
Since 1970 recording has been carried out on a 5 x 5 km or ‘quadrant’ basis, of
which there are 86 in Fife and 14 in Kinross (whole or in part). Every one has been
visited several times and at different seasons - some have been examined on many
occasions - and localities for older records have been checked wherever feasible.
However, a quadrant is quite a large area and it has not been possible to investigate
every corner. Therefore there are bound to be omissions and oversights, while it is a
truism that nearly every individual field worker is ‘blind’ to some species or may not
have enough experience of some groups to recognise everything seen.
The categorisation of the frequency of a plant’s occurrence is very much a subjective
exercise, and cannot be based solely on the number of sightings, i.e. the terms used
should not be denoted in an exclusively quantitative way. Thus in the following
account species ranked below very common or common (i.e. found in about
60-100% of quadrants) have been assessed qualitatively as much as by how often or
how little they occur. There is therefore no hard and fast distinction between the
following terms (given in descending order of occurrence): frequent, occasional,
infrequent, uncommon rare and very rare (the last is limited to one or two current
sites).
The description of the status of non-native species is adapted from the categories
employed by Clement and Foster in Alien Plants of the British Isles (1994), as
follows:
Naturalised: established extensively amongst native vegetation so as to appear
native
Established: likely to remain permanently, reproducing by seed or spreading
Persistent: remaining longer than two years, hardly reproducing or spreading
Introduced: deliberately planted or sown in the wild
Casual: not persisting for more than two years without re-introduction
Recorded: a published record
Reported: not a published record