The Plants of Acadia National Park

Building on the data collected by Dr. Craig Green of College of the Atlantic, The Plants of Acadia National Park was published in 2010 – the first field guide of its kind for the area. 

The plants of the Acadia National Park region have long fascinated those who have encountered them. Botanical explorations of the area were initiated in 1880 by the Champlain Society, a group of Harvard University students who cataloged the flora and geology of Mount Desert Island from their encampment in Somes Sound. John Redfield, an attorney and amateur botanist, began his own study of the flora two years later. In 1888, Champlain Society member Edward Rand began to collaborate with Redfield to compile and consolidate botanical discoveries by the Champlain Society and reports from other botanists. Their results were published as Flora of Mount Desert Island, Maine (Rand and Redfield 1894).

In the early 1980s, Dr. Craig Greene rekindled interest in compiling a flora of the Acadia National Park region. These efforts included collaboration with numerous botanists, College of the Atlantic students, and Acadia National Park biologists. Several progress reports were published based on fieldwork conducted in portions of the Acadia National Park region (Glanz and Connery 1999; Greene 1990; Greene et al. 1999, 2002, 2004; Miccelhauser et al. 1996; Reiner and Mclendon 2002). Rand and Redfield had published their flora
“with the hope that it can serve as a means of exciting interest in the undertaking, and thus make possible a more complete catalogue in the near future.”
Over a century after Rand and Redfield’s 1894 preliminary catalogue, we presented a comprehensive vascular flora of the Acadia National Park region in our 2005 paper Vascular Flora of the Acadia National Park Region, Maine, published in Rhodora, the journal of the New England Botanical Club (Greene et al. 2005). We were encouraged by many plant enthusiasts to use our scientific paper as the basis of an up-to-date identification guide to the plants that grow here.

(Excerpt from the introduction of The Plants of Acadia National Park)

National awards for this publication

• The Sarah Chapman Francis Medal (Garden Club of America)
• The Association of Partners for Public Lands’ (APPL) Media & Partnership Award

Collaborators

• The Garden Club of Mount Desert
• Friends of Acadia