Flora of Europe, a Bit of History.
Welcome to one of the oldest websites on the internet!
In 1993 Merik Voswinkel and Hans Loots started the first public internet provider Knoware from my home in
the Netherlands (see the dutch wikipedia text). My father Aart Voswinkel was
therefore in the position to start this first website back in those days that a personal website was unheard of (and it did cost a lot of money!).
This website was also state of the art in 1993, so keep that in mind when you visit this website in 2008, 15 years later!
The goal of this website was (and still is!) that everybody can participate and add flowers to this website so eventually it will contain all the flowers of the world.
This was 7 years before the start of Wikipedia!
Besides some Google ads, nothing has changed since 1998, the year that Aart Voswinkel died. I keep the site online as a memorial to my father and as a bit of internet history.
I am now in the process of redesigning the site with the most modern web technologies available, like
Seaside ,
Croquet and
Lively Kernel.
If you want to participate in this redesign, send me an email at Flora of Europe
The rest of this page is the original text written by Aart Voswinkel in 1994:
Flora of Europe, General information.
This "Flora on line" is an - amateur - photo-herbarium and at the beginnig
of 1997 it contains ca. 660 pictures of flowers, mostly of southern Europe.
There are 284 species (63 families, 179 genera)
Up till now it is the work of one person, but several people contacted me to send there pictures.
Version 3.1.0 again has several changes: Thank you all, for advising me !
- The pictures now have the name of the species, mostly in the upper left corner.
- The links no longer contains spaces, so that, for instance, unix machines no longer refuses them.
- Several mis-spellings have been corrected.
- A few false identifications are corrected.
- Not all the botanical names are up-to-date: I am working on that topic,
but my resources are limited. Most of my literature is a bit old.
- If you have comments, email them to "
".
Send Your Own Pictures !!
Conditions for adding flowers/pictures to this flora:
- all information must be in english;
- the pictures must be good;
- classification (diagnoses) of species are as correct as possible;
- data must be in a standard form;
Up till now descriptions are mostly taken from the "Flora Europea", but that
is certainly no must. A lot of work has to be done here, because only a few species
have their descriptions at this moment.
Literature used at this start:
- Flora Europea: Nutin et al. Standard work, 5 volumes, text only;
- Fl.o.S.W.Europe: Oleg Polunin & B.E.Smythes, Flowers of S.W.Europe; 1973;
- Fl.o.Europe: Oleg Polunin, Flowers of Europe; 1973;
- Exkfl.v.Deutschl.: W.Rothmaler, Exkursionsflora von Deutschland 1994;
The works of Polunin (& Smythes), with their many good pictures are still very
good for first recognition in the field.
The german flora covers the german territory in 3 volumes.Many good designs.
Also one volume about lower plants ("Niedere Pflanzen").
Add your own good books.
Other interesting biology sites:
Flora of Europe (C) 1993-2008 M.A.Voswinkel, All rigths reserved.