Product Description

Whether you are a tree enthusiast or an arboricultural expert, this guide is ideal for home and field reference. From sky-high horse chesnuts to modest maples, learn about a wide-range of trees with this clear and concise guide. With selections of trees native to the UK and Europe, you can be sure that wherever you are, this guide will be an invaluable companion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #59400 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
"These are by far the best, most colourful and well-laid out pocket nature books on the market!" www.thebookplace.co.uk

About the Author
Allen Coombes is Botanist at the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens, UK, and his publications include 'DK Eyewitness Handbook Trees' and 'RHS Practical Guide Trees for Small Gardens'. He frequently writes articles for periodicals such as 'The Plantsman', 'The Garden' and 'Kew Magazine'. Allen resides in Hampshire.

Customer Reviews

Based on other books in the series I was expecting much more
I ordered this book because I have the books "Rocks and Minerals", "Butterflies" and "Wild Flowers" all in the same series - and really like them all.

This book was such a dissapointment by comparison. I live next door to a park which has a managed woodland and several acres of ecological parkland. I bought the book to help me to identify the many trees.

In fact, friends and relatives have been far more useful than the book, which has only allowed me to recognize one tree so far.

The problem for me lies in the focus of the book on photographs of the entire tree. The book is small so the images, even though they take up a big part of the page, area also small. This makes it impossible to really find any useful features on the tree except the outline. Outlines are, however, provided in the form of a small illustration which shows the tree with and without leaves which seems to make the photograph somewhat redundant.

The rest of the page gives a description (good), and images of some of the other diagnostic features - fruit, leaves and sometimes flowers. For me the flowers are the most easy aspect of the tree to use as a diagnostic element but flowers are not always shown - and when they are they are not always particularly clear.

It is a pretty book, but I personally don't find it useful for the task for which it was purchased.

excellent pocket guide
This guide makes painstaking use of photography (3 pictures per species) to squeeze as much data as possible into a pocket format. In comparison, purely illustration-based tree guides do not have enough accurate information to assist identification 'in the field'. This has helped me identify many species in urban and rural settings.

There are 3-4 species across facing pages and each entry's relationship to the overall sequence allows intuition to help in locating tree candidates.