Floristic and cytotaxonomic notes on the flora of the Maltese Islands

In the spring of 1968 and 1969 the two senior authors visited the Maltese Islands of Malta and Gozo and collected and photographed plants. The entire herbarium collection amounts to about 350 numbers. The first set is deposited in the herbarium of the State University of Utrecht; duplicates were sent chiefly to the herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh. Critical determination of the material yielded some results which may be interesting from a floristictaxonomic viewpoint and are therefore reported below. Beside herbarium material fruits and seeds were collected; the samples that germinated were investigated cytotaxonomically by the two junior authors. The results are also presented in the following. The first truly comprehensive account of the flora of the Maltese Islands is by Sommier & Caruana Gatto (1912-1915); it includes also the lower cryptogams. The older literature is also reviewed there. It is fairly complete and, for its time, taxonomically reasonably up to date. Then the Maltese botanist J. Borg published his “Descriptive flora of the Maltese Islands” (1927), dealing only with vascular plants. This flora, on the other hand, was taxonomically antiquated even when it was published, reflecting the state of knowledge of plant taxonomy of some decades earlier, and therefore nomenclaturally also very much out of date. Since that time Malta has had very little attention in the botanical literature. Some notes or brief paragraphs are devoted to its flora in such general books as Adamovic’s “Die pflanzengeographische Stellung und Gliederung Italiens” (1933) and Rikli’s “Das Pflanzenkleid der Mittelmeerlander” (2nd ed. In 1960 Lanfranco published his “Guide to the flora of Malta with 300 illustrations”. The plants included in it are a rather arbitrary selection from Borg’s flora, whose nomenclature is also uncritically followed. A modern flora, with keys, is lacking.