Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers

However, one must judge a guide purely from the viewpoint of the potential user. Clearly this is NOT for botanists but the general public – the sort of guide one might carry on a country walk or turn to when one of the kid’s asks what is that flower. Judged from that angle its use is very limited.

Almost any photographic guide suffers from a central problem… camera’s don’t work like brains. If you take a plant photo in situ the camera doesn’t filter out everything else, nor does it pick out the most salient feature – the thing that makes a plantain a plantain or a rose a rose… the brain does. This is why I favour guides with drawn illustrations, they can cover different phases and plant parts as well as point out the crucial ID features.

Furthermore, this guide is more suited to an outing looking for target species than it is for identifying what you see. If you want to achieve the latter then there needs to be a way for the user to quickly get to a candidate species. The obvious way would be to use colour as the primary filter, with height or flower shape as a second or tertiary filter. The book is not a botanical guide or it would have to cover hundreds of plants rather than the far fewer common ones covered. However, it is set out in taxonomic order. This makes sense where you cover all species of an order, such as all the reptiles or birds found in an area, but not when you are covering the most common, for the common (wo)man. Even names are important. A botanist is likely to know Clematis vitalba as Traveller’s Joy, but I’d lay odds the majority would know it as ‘Old man’s beard’. I would also prefer less description (that’s what pictures are for) and more formulaic guiding such as the distribution etc. set out as well as is the flowering time.