Unlike the faunas discussed in the previous chapter, county and national floras were commonplace by the nineteenth century. Cornwall's botanists therefore operated in quite a different intellectual economy to their zoological counterparts. The likes of James Edward Smith, James Sowerby, Dawson Turner, William and Joseph Hooker, and Hewett Cottrell Watson advanced botanical beyond zoological science such that Charles Darwin could claim in 1856 that ‘Botany has been followed in so much more a philosophical spirit than Zoology’. As a result provincial botanists were much more heavily regulated than their zoological counterparts and operated with much less latitude and in a much more crowded field. In the same year that Jonathan Couch was laying out his zoological prospectus to the RIC, the Worcestershire naturalist Edwin Lees was able to state, without defence or justification, that the ‘utility of local floras is indispensable, not merely as a companion to the wandering Botanist, but as data for the Scientific generaliser’. Whilst Lees was willing to admit that works such as his own on the Malvern Hills had a range of well-defined roles, he was quick to note the lack of such a study in his chosen area of research: ‘it is almost marvellous that, visited as the Malvern Hills are from all parts of the world, no complete account of their vegetable productions has ever yet been published’. This was a common refrain in regional or local floras of the period: a simultaneous acknowledgement of the author's limited role in an already crowded philosophical field and a justification of their presence on the basis of a blank area on the nation's botanical map.

This chapter examines the work of Cornish botanists across the course of the nineteenth century and pays particular attention to several county botanical projects and their chief organizers: Elizabeth Warren and John Ralfs. It will be shown that Warren, Ralfs and others were embedded in national botanical networks and as a result were closely regulated by those networks’ fine-grained social and intellectual conventions.