Title page and facing
illustration of Mary McCallum Webster's 1978 Flora. The cover
illustration is of Grass of Parnassus.Mary McCallum Webster must be to the twentieth century what Gordon, Innes and Keith were to the nineteenth. She was born in Sussex in 1906, and spent much of her life working with Botanical Institutions, such as the Cambridge School of Botany and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. In 1964 she came to live at Dyke, in Moray, and became closely involved with the Moray Field Club, The Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI), The Botanical Society of Edinburgh, The Linnean Society of London, and the Inverness Botany Group. It was perhaps in her capacity as local Vice County Recorder for the BSBI that she acquired such an encyclopedic knowledge of local plants, and led to her publication of the Flora of Moray, Nairn and East Inverness in 1978. She died in the early 1980s.
Title page and facing
illustration of Mary McCallum Webster's 1978 Flora. The cover
illustration is of Grass of Parnassus.
The entry for Pinguicula vulgaris
(Butterwort). Like the Alpine Clubmoss featured on the alpines page, this species has now disappeared from its
habitats on Califer Hill, near Forres. Tree planting, draining of wet ground,
and application of fertilisers to pasture may all have had an influence on its
disappearance. The plant survives well in some of the more upland areas, for
example near Bridge of Brown, where there are fewer human pressures on the
habitat.
