Biology.ie and Wild Flowers of Ireland
( www.wildflowersofireland.net.) are working together to bring the wildflower enthusiast a better experience. Zoe Devlin, the creator of www.wildflowersofireland.net has built up an admirable photographic library of Ireland's wildflowers over many years. Its availability online is a wonderful resource for Ireland's wildlife enthusiasts.
The web site is a personal record of wildflowers found and photographed by Zoe Devlin over a number of years. It is more than a catalogue of wildflowers as the web site has the added value of giving their flowering periods, plant similarities and folklore, together with literary and historical allusions. You can search her web site by colour, month of flowering, plant families and the Common, Latin and Irish names. Furthermore there is a glossary for help with unfamiliar botanical terms.
Flowers in the Biology.ie database can be checked on Zoe's web site and those on Zoe's web site can be mapped on Biology.ie. Click here for Zoe Devlin's Wild Flowers of Ireland.
Jenny Seawright's Irish Wild Flowers
Another wonderful wildflower resource is Jenny Seawright's Irish Wild Flowers Click here for Jenny's site.
Jenny's site also has an additional section with photographs illustrating some of the many Trees, Ferns, Fern Allies, Grasses, Rushes and Wood-rushes, Club-rushes and Sedges, Mosses and Liverworts and Lichens to be found in Ireland. An admirable opus of work that has recently extended to moths. See www.irishmoths.net
How to improve your wildflower identification
Use a magnifying-glass - at least 10x - and capture as much detail as you can by camera, bearing in mind that the scent of some plants can be a help to identification. A small ruler is also very useful to photograph alongside the flower as it's sometimes hard to remember the size afterward.
Always bring your wildflower guide-book to the plant and not the other way around.
***Remember you can use My sightings (large green button above) to keep track of your own sightings.***