Product Description

Featuring all flowering plants, including trees and grasses, and ferns, this brand-new field guide to the flowers of Britain and northern Europe is the most complete illustrated, single-volume guide ever published. Leading botanical artists have been specially commissioned to ensure accurate, detailed illustrations. Species are described and illustrated on the same page, with up-to-date authoritative text aiding identification. Plants are arranged by family, with their key features highlighted for quick and easy reference. The text offers a complete account of over 1,900 wild flowers of Britain and Ireland, along with a summary of their European distribution. 'Collins Flower Guide' is an indispensable guide for all those with an interest in the countryside, whether amateur or expert.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23936 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-30
• Format: Import
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 576 pages

About the Author
David Streeter is Reader in Ecology in the School of Biological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sussex and a member of the Editorial Board of the prestigious Collins New Naturalist series. He has served on the council of the Botanical Society of the British Isles and as chairman of its Conservation Committee and he is president of the Sussex Wildlife Trust.

Customer Reviews

Excellent new field guide
The new Collins guide combines excellent life like illustrations with very good text. Many tips to help identify plants. Hopefully it will encourage people and look at their local flora

Good botanical detail & illustrations
I brought this book as an update to Keble-Martin's "Concise British Flora" which I have always used. I prefer illustrated guides to photographic ones - you can't beat a white background for giving the best sillouette of a plant's outline. It's brief descriptions of individual species are helpful, grouping them as you would expect by family. The keys are also invaluable for identifying plants to species level. However, I think a more suitable title for the book would have been "Illustrated Wild Flower Guide/Key" not just "Flower Guide", which may present initial confusion to those looking for guides on cultivated plants. Minor mistakes, such as the omission of the Sweet Flag (Acorus calamus) inflorescence, and the small circles which give magnified detail to diagnostic features, seem careless. The book also skips over difficult to identify species like Hieracium, giving only one generalised illustation, yet gives space to cultivated Peony (Paeonia mascula), an isolated example of which grows on Flat Holm island. I would hardly describe this species as "naturalised", when it is known only from a single occurrence. This is not a field guild, being far to cumbersome and inappropriately bound, but it is probably the most extensive illustrated guide to British flora currently available, so will make a useful up-to-date reference guide for many. It may also be of interest to know that this guide will soon be available in a large format addition, so the illustrated plates that have been reduced in size for this addition maybe clearer to see. Some of the earlier mistakes will also hopefully be corrected.

A beautiful new field guide to the flowering plants of Britain and Ireland
I confess to being a field guide addict, so when I this new Collins Flower Guide at the Birdfair, I knew I had to get it. The previous titles in this series - birds, butterflies and trees - are the definitive guides to their respective groups; indeed Collins Bird Guide, in my opinion, sets the standard as the best field guide to an avifauna anywhere in the world. So despite the price, it was not hard to part with the money.

Having field-tested this book at the tail end of the flowering season, I am certainly not disappointed. The book is billed as "the most complete guide to the flowers of Britain and Europe", and it probably is. Some 1,900 species are described and the grasses and ferns are treated to full colour plates. The attractive features of the other guides in the Collins series - plates and text on a single spread, clear type-face and layout, compact form, excellent illustrations - are all here. The plates are particularly satisfying: beautifully painted, they look to be the most accurate yet included in a guide of this type. And, as in other plant guides, keys are provided as a more structured way to identify flowers.

But this book faces some pretty stiff competition, namely from Blamey, Fitter & Fitter's Wild Flowers of Britain and Ireland and Rose's Wild Flower Key. How does it stand up? I'm a sucker for Marjorie Blamey's illustrations, so I have most of her books and I love Wild Flowers of Britain and Ireland, not least as an armchair flora. Rose has long (at least for the quarter century since I took any botany classes) been recognised as the most accurate illustrated field flora - the botanist's guide of choice. Despite its fine illustrations and keys, I am not sure that this current guide can rival either of them. I took both Rose and the Collins guide out into Norfolk and ran several plants - tricky things like umbellifers and crucifers - through the keys and Rose performed flawlessly, whereas the new guide was a little murkier. Some of the illustrations are quite "washed out" or at least not as saturated as others, leading to some loss of details - notably in the Asteraceae in my copy. Opened the book at the oaks, I noticed that the Sessile Oak caption is missing - admittedly just a detail. In the end though, much as I warm to the new guide, I find that I am carrying Rose rather than the Collins guide into the field when I want a reference I can depend on. Perhaps it's just that when I pick up a guide, Rose fits more easily into my pocket and is a fair bit lighter.

In sum, this is a guide that the plant enthusiast will want to have, but if you already possess a trusted field guide like Rose, you may not want to pay for the more expensive new Collins Flower Guide, beautiful as the illustrations may be. Having said that, I have no regrets at having this handsome new field guide on my shelves - the more field guides the better.

Chris Sharpe, 4 November 2009. ISBN-13: 978-0-00-710621-9