A New British Flora: British Wild Flowers in their Natural Haunts

Abstract

THE first two volumes of this work were reviewed in NATURE of April 21 last, p. 232. Vol. 3 deals with flowers of the woods and copses, roadsides and hedges, while the fourth volume presents the flowers of “mountains, hills, and dry places,” “lakes, rivers, ditches, and wet places,” “waste places, gardens, refuse-heags, village greens, farmyards, etc.” While thoroughly unbotanical in that it scatters the various species of the same genus, yet in a semi-popular work of this kind the method has much to be said for it. The coloured plates fitre beautifully done, and the photographs, of which there is at least one for nearly every species, are almost uniformly excellent, and many of them are triumphs of art. Perhaps the best feature of the work is that the photographs in almost every case show the habit of the plant in its native haunts. Where the plant is shown as part of a landscape the effect is often beautiful, as in the photographs of a reed swamp on a Norfolk broad and of the great yellow watercress. In a photograph such as that which is meant to illustrate the duckweed, the latter occupying only a small patch on the water surface, the conspicuous elements of the vegetation which fill the rest of the figure might have been indicated by marginal names. The “close-up” photographs are almost uniformly successful, and we know of no other series to equal them. Occasionally, however, as in the photograph of the bugle (Ajuga reptans), the plants are too closely surrounded by other vegetation to show their distinctive features. The figure of the lily-of-the-valley is evidently taken from a garden. Anyone who has seen it flowering wild in an English copse would wish that the more dainty wild plant might have been captured by the camera in its natural surroundings. The distribution of each species in Britain is given in considerable detail, together with the various local names and a mass of folk-lore the utility of which is somewhat doubtful. A New British Flora: British Wild Flowers in their Natural Haunts. Described by A. R. Horwood. Vol. 3, pp. xi+251+plateS 18–31; Vol. 4, pp. xi + 257 + plates 32–49; Vol. 5, pp. xi + 234+ plates 50–64; Vol. 6, pp. xix + 232. (London: The Gresham Publishing Co., Ltd., 1919.) 12s. 6d. net each vol.