The vegetation of Skomer can perhaps best be described in general terms as an intricate mix of colour, diversity and a series, or pattern, of interlocking plant associations.  But the lovely things are the easiest to remember. Masses of daffodils and narcissi blow about in the sunlight before the gaping door of the  farmhouse, and the cliffs are washed with pink and white of thrift and campion.  Primroses wait shyly beneath the curling bracken. The glory of inland Skomer are its bluebells thriving in dense colonies.  Their rich bluebell blueness produces a kind of haze hovering above the dead bracken and the stems produce a squeaky noise when they rub together. Combined with the liquid cry of the curlew, the lovely blue of the sea, and the fantastic colours of the distant cliffs, bluebells are the poetic emblem of Skomer.  Every May we are reminded that the broad stream of British botany was started in the 1520s by William Turner when he first saw his massed bluebells 'muche aboute Sion'.

The basic attraction of flowering plants takes us close to the rival ways of looking at the natural world- the cool, detached light of disinterested scientific reason, and the red- blooded passionate creations of the artist.  These produce the modern incoherence and we shift uneasily from foot to foot as we recognise their incompatibility. The painter of a swathe of bluebells creates her own personal value.  The artist does not discover, calculate or deduce as the scientist does.  In creating, the artist invents a goal.  Where is the song before the composer has conceived it?  In contrast, there is a particular, and at the moment, unknown explanation as to why the densest drift of bluebells is to be found on the slopes of north valley.  If one botanist fails to reveal it by deduction and experiment, someone else will.

So, Skomer's world of plants can take us from the lyrical inventions of poets, painters and authors, through the species lists, each of which is a one-off snap shot ot the island's diversity, to mapping the distribution of plant communities and their simplification by statistical analysis of quadrats and transects.  In moving in this direction we pass from the goals of art to target the dynamics of ecology, which on Skomer are questions about the reliable flow of carbon and nutrients into millions of bluebells each spring, and the influence of the marine environment on year by year changes in the balance of one species to its neighbours