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Leif & Anita Stridvall

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Primula villosa

Leontopodium alpinum

Cistus creticus

Orchis lactea

Amanita muscaria

If you have an interest in some field of botany, whether flowering plants or plants like fungi and lichens, this might be the site for you. It is designed to be viewed at a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels or higher, preferably in full screen mode and with a high-speed connection. Our server has newly been upgraded, both in terms of hardware and software, so it should not be blamed for any speed problems.

We are a married couple from Sweden (not botanists by profession), who have devoted quite a lot of our spare time in search for plants of various kinds. In the warmer season the flowering plants have been the main subject of our interest, especially the alpine and mediterranean flora. Over the passed forty years we have paid numerous summer visits to most mountain areas in Europe (with a couple of detours far into adjacent Turkey) hunting for wild flowers, endemics in particular. In springtime many plant-seeking holidays have been spent in the Mediterranean area, the islands of Crete and Cyprus being our preferred goals. As for Sweden, our homeland, the large limestone island of Gotland in the Baltic with its rich plant life has been our favourite holiday spot.

In the last few years we have paid a number of winter or spring visits to some of the Canary Islands with their highly specialized and very interesting flora, which boasts of many endemics. During a long stay in 1999 we met with the abundance, overwhelmimg beauty and unmatched diversity of the Western Australian flora, most species being endemic to the area. Two years later we visited the southeastern part of the continent (New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia), where the flora is also rich but looks much less interesting in comparison with the botanic marvels of southwestern Australia.

Over the years these plant-hunting activities have produced a considerable amount of pictures of flowering plants. We should like to convey to you some of the variety and beauty of the wild flowers, which we have experienced during our botanizing forays. For that purpose we have put together a rather extensive Flower Gallery. Hopefully you will enjoy it.

Since our retirement we have paid much more attention to less conspicuous organisms like lichens and mosses. A Lichen Gallery with a number of newly recorded photos has consequently been added.

It is however in the field of mycology, that we have been most active. Since the early seventies the fungi still are our main interest, especially Agarics and Boleti, on which we have written many papers, mostly in Jordstjärnan (now Svensk Mykologisk Tidskrift), the journal of the Swedish Mycological Society. From the very beginning we have kept field notes of our findings, which are now computerized. We have been investigating the mycoflora in different parts of Sweden but above all in our home county, Västra Götaland, from which we now know about 1600 species of Agarics and Boleti, a high number, reflecting the highly diversified nature of this county but also the joint efforts of many dedicated mycologists.

Finally we have set up a Fungus Gallery, to start with some of our digital photos from recent years (most of them free-hand shots with the built-in camera flash). Scanned images of slides have later been added. The private database of our mycological findings has however been fully available on the Web right from the start of this site in 2005. It comprises at present (january 2007) about 210 000 items, of which more than 90 % relate to the County of Västra Götaland. Our database contains primarily findings of Agarics and Boleti and ranges over the period from 1970 to 2006. That part of our site is primarily addressed to a Swedish public and accordingly the language is Swedish (the menu items at the very top of the page in question will however display popup information boxes with text in English). Morover viewing distribution maps and glancing through lists of species does not require any knowledge in Swedish. Judging from our experience of German and French journals on mycology the knowledge abroad of the Swedish mycoflora is insufficient. Hopefully a glance at our site will contribute in some way to remedy this.

      Gallery statistics from last update
  • Flowers: 3701 species (11641 photos)
  • Lichens: 783 species (3850 photos)
  • Fungi: 1501 species (4423 photos)
Erythronium dens-canis

Gentiana terglouensis

Anemone coronaria

Ophrys fuciflora

Caloplaca thallincola