Oklahoma Native Plant Record, Volume 5, Number 1, December 2005


Oklahoma Native Plant Record 3
Volume 5, Number 1, December 2005

Forward

In this fifth year of publication we are experiencing a wider interest in The Oklahoma
Native Plant Record. Subscriptions go to members, libraries, and herbaria, as well as amateur and
professional botanists across the nation. We have had the honor of presenting, for our readers,
historic and seminal works never before published; works that had only been available as
photocopies of research done for Masters’ theses and Ph.D. dissertations. With most we have
also published current regional floras for comparison with the historic works. Soon we hope to
have all these works available for global inquiry when our pages become available on the world
wide web.

Along with regional floras we’ve offered interdisciplinary articles describing human
impacts on Oklahoma’s vegetation as well as species distribution information of interest to
landscapers and naturalists. The wide variety of articles reflects the diversity of membership in
the Oklahoma Native Plant Society. It is clear that the journal best serves the purposes of the
Society when it cross-communicates between disciplines, geographic borders, professionals, and
non-members. We welcome and celebrate the variety of sources offered to our readers.

The pimpled prairie article provides one of those cross-disciplinary research articles. It is
an interesting look at one of the causes of Oklahoma’s native floral diversity; its complex soil
and plant interactions. I think you’ll find it intriguing and hopefully, worthy of additional
research.

Hoagland and Buthod have once again provided an up-to-date regional flora, this one
from Pawnee County. With their work our species lists will eventually cover the entire state. 

Crawford and Crawford, a new husband and wife research team, have begun their
careers with the thoroughly done flora additions for Garvin County. We look forward to hearing
more from them.

In this issue we also pay tribute to Dr. John Taylor, co-author with his wife, Dr.
Constance Taylor, of the single most used botanical resource for information regarding
Oklahoma’s native species, An annotated list of the ferns, fern allies, gymnosperms and flowering plants of
Oklahoma. We are pleased to include his Masters thesis which began his life-long career as
researcher and teacher. John passed away in November of 2004. Connie has done a great job of
reformatting his work for present-day publishing standards and we are very grateful for her help.

There is still much research to be done on Oklahoma’s native flora and the next
generation needs to know where to begin in this awesome yet rewarding task. So please continue
to tell others about the Oklahoma Native Plant Record and thank you for reading it.

Sheila A. Strawn
2005