Ann Stafford has been interested in natural history all her life. Growing up in the English countryside, she learnt from her parents, and from books with colour pictures, to identify plants and animals. In 1965 she & her husband went to live in his native Guyana, part of the Amazon basin rainforest system. They frequently went into the interior, the ‘bush’, with its wonderful wildlife. In 1973 they moved to the Cayman Islands, where they have lived ever since. Ann has learnt to identify many of Cayman’s indigenous and naturalized plants and has recorded butterflies & their larval food plants. She is interested in arousing a greater awareness of the inter-relationship between Cayman’s unique flora and fauna. Ann and her husband have two sons and seven grandchildren.

Twenty-eight species and varieties of plants are considered to be endemic, those that evolved in the Cayman Islands, including Casearia staffordiae, Cayman Casearia, Family SALICAEAE. Ann Stafford discovered this plant in 2001, while walking on the Mastic Trail; she was looking for something else. In order for renowned Caribbean botanist, Dr. George R. Proctor, author of the FLORA of the Cayman Islands 1984 and 2nd. Edition 2012, to determine its identity, flowers and fruits had to be found. In November 2002, tiny flowers were found on this rare plant that grows only in the Mastic region of Grand Cayman.  In January 2005 little fruits were eventually found. Dr. Proctor took a specimen to the United States National Herbarium at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Comparing it with close relatives of the genus Casearia, he determined that it was a previously undescribed species, a species new to science. He named it Casearia staffordiae. It is a very slow-growing Critically Endangered Grand Cayman endemic shrub.

http://dps.plants.ox.ac.uk/bol/Cayman

FLORA of the CAYMAN ISLANDS

by George R. Proctor, Second Edition 2012,

Kew Publishing

Now in stock!

ISBN 978-1-84246-403-8

http://www.kewbooks.com/asps/ShowDetails.asp?id=874

In the end, we will conserve only what we love,
We will love only what we understand,
We will understand only what we are taught.’

Baba Dioum, Senegalese conservationist