GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Summary

The background to the work

It is a tribute to the insight of our early ecologists that we can still return with profit to Types of British Vegetation which Tansley (1911) edited for the British Vegetation Committee as the first coordinated attempt to recognise and describe different kinds of plant community in this country. The contributors there wrote practically all they knew and a good deal that they guessed, as Tansley himself put it, but they were, on their own admission, far from comprehensive in their coverage. It was to provide this greater breadth, and much more detailed description of the structure and development of plant communities, that Tansley (1939) drew together the wealth of subsequent work in The British Islands and their Vegetation, and there must be few ecologists of the generations following who have not been inspired and challenged by the vision of this magisterial book.

Yet, partly because of its greater scope and the uneven understanding of different kinds of vegetation at the time, this is a less systematic work than Types in some respects: its narrative thread of explication is authoritative and engaging, but it lacks the light-handed framework of classification which made the earlier volume so very attractive, and within which the plant communities might be related one to another, and to the environmental variables which influence their composition and distribution.