Island Life, published in 2008 and furnishing the basis for the species lists section of this website, included an extensive treatment of the Vineyard’s flora, the years since then have seen enormous changes in plant taxonomy and nomenclature, and in the list of plants known to occur on Martha’s Vineyard. Our partner organization Polly Hill Arboretum has advanced the study of Vineyard flora with an ambitious herbarium project, searching for new species, relocating and documenting historical populations where possible, and building and curating a state-of-the-art herbarium specimen collection. Creating a plant list specifically for the Martha’s Vineyard Atlas of Life, therefore, would be redundant, and Polly Hill has generously allowed us to create a link to their flora web page. The buttons below will take you there or to an equally valuable site (also external) maintained by the Consortium of Northeastern Herbaria, offering a searchable database of regional herbaria records with digital images of specimens.
While its taxonomy and comprehensiveness have suffered from the advances mentioned above, the essay on Vineyard flora by the late Stephen Spongberg in the original, print version of Island Life remains a very valuable resource and is linked internally using the sidebar to the left.