Collins Wild Flower Guide

Product Information

Birds continue to arrive in the UK from more northerly regions to spend the next few months here in our warmer winters, before. Following on from its successful launch in 2009, Collins Wild Flower Guide – the ultimate reference book for wild flower enthusiasts – now enters its second edition. Collins Wild Flower Guide is an indispensable guide for all those with an interest in the countryside, whether amateur or expert. This book isn't just a 'look up the pictures to find your plant' book, it has a key-system that actually performs very well indeed when compared to other serious ID books - very pleasantly surprised by this book, it's beautiful and a powerful ID tool!

Does not have a particularly user friendly key so not the best book for quickly finding the identify of a flower unless you have rough idea to start with.The effort and technical expertise given in this book is due to the valiant effort of many taxonomists, and my hat comes off! This is an updated version of a book which was first published in 2009 as the 'Collins Flower Guide', which has been renamed presumably to make it clear that it is a guide to wild flowers rather than those grown in gardens! In some cases, such as the splitting up of the Scrophulariaceae and the Liliaceae into a number of separate families, this has resulted in some unfamiliar changes although in many cases they had already been predicted by traditional taxonomy. 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. Spreads are indicated by surrounding icons representing items on the same (double page) spread in a grey box.

Species are described and illustrated on the same page, with up-to-date authoritative text aiding identification. I could not find any information in the introduction about the changes made from the original version, but the illustrations appear to be unchanged, and most of the species accounts seem to be the same or have only minor changes. Cercavo questa guida che purtroppo anche per l'Italia e' l'unica guida della flora illustrata non specialistica di qualita'. The illustrations I thought at first were quite small then with a closer look I saw how accurate they are - the depictions in most cases make it possible to recognise the whole plant and only need a closer inspection where plants are very similar.This has been my main botanical reference book for 8 years of working as an ecologist, carrying out a variety of botanical surveys.