Virtually no records of Sark’s profusion of wildflowers were kept before the nineteenth century. In 1564 Helier de Carteret would have found the island a windswept plateau top covered in brambles, bracken and furze (whin or gorse) with valleys devoid of trees. The gardener, Thomas Knowlton (1691 – 1781), mentioned a white foxglove in 1726. Professor CC Babington recorded 252 plants in 1838, and published his Primitiae Florae Sarnicae the…