Compiled by Clive Stace

Compiled by Clive Stace, Book Reviews Editor

Appletree House, Larters Lane, Middlewood Green, Stowmarket, IP14 5HB

Loughborough Naturalists’ Club, Loughborough, 2022; pp. 310, with many colour photographs and other illustrations; pbk £18.00. Obtainable via www. loughboroughnats.org. ISBN 9780956281517

Over 360 years after Ray’s Cambridge Catalogue, the range of county, district and site Floras has grown steadily, and been joined by hundreds of accounts of breeding birds, butterflies, dragonflies and other wildlife. Comprehensive accounts of the whole flora and fauna of an area remain rare, with single volumes about a few sites, and series of papers for a few more. Woodward, Ikin and the Loughborough Naturalists’ Club have produced the best-illustrated and most wide-ranging single-site survey I have seen. It includes 3403 taxa from flowers and birds to gall-wasps and tardigrades.

Grace Dieu, named from a ruined priory, comprises 176ha on the edge of Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire. It includes broadleaved woodland, some of it ancient, plantations, ponds, a fen, a gravel-bottomed brook, acid and neutral grassland, acidic rock outcrops and limestone quarries. The introduction describes the geology and landscape history. Twenty-two taxonomic chapters outline recording history and field techniques, identification literature and websites, before listing the species. Historical records have been updated by many Club field trips in the five years 2008–12. The vascular flora is the longest chapter: 54 pages, 619 species, 140 photographs. Grace Dieu has attracted botanists since the 18th century. Churchill Babington lived next to the site. His cousin, Charles Cardale Babington, visited occasionally with Rev. John Stevens Henslow. Many other 19th and 20th century botanists knew Grace Dieu, so the authors can illustrate changes through time. The 2008–12 survey re-found Lathraea squamaria (Toothwort) and Viola palustris (Marsh Violet). A tiny population of Equisetum hyemale (Rough Horsetail) has survived since at least 1838. Aliens are treated thoroughly, including planted trees. Critical genera are covered more patchily, with a few historical records of Rubus, a few modern Rosa. All Hieracium were checked by the BSBI referee, but no Taraxacum microspecies are recorded. Bryophytes (14 pages, 143 species), fungi (22 pages, 528 species) and lichens (8 pages, 160 species) are well documented; algae were sampled from a few locations, and include four stoneworts. The zoological chapters reflect the availability of local specialists, historical data and identification guides. For most groups, the larger and more abundant species are well recorded, with interesting ecological details and often striking illustrations. Where species identification proved impossible, genus or family records are included.

The work ends with a brief analysis of the results, a gazetteer, glossary and index. The A4 softback volume seems sturdily bound. Printing and colour rendition are excellent. It has clearly been carefully proofread, and I have so far found no misidentifications, quite an achievement for a work of such breadth.

No site study can be comprehensive, but this is probably as thorough as a determined group of skilled fieldworkers can produce. Midlands naturalists will find it fascinating. Anyone who has pondered how many species they might find in their local area should be provoked into wider recording. For beginning naturalists, it is also a ‘how-to’ guide introducing the study of almost all of British biodiversity.

Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2022; pp. 352, with over 1500 coloured photos; pbk £20.00. ISBN 9780691238456

From the briefest flick through, this field guide is obviously a quality production and stands out from the crowd. The layout is very pleasing and clear, the photographs are excellent, very skilfully taken, and the colours are true. Furthermore, the printing standard and paper quality is very high and the cover has a slight waxy feel which appears suitable for fieldwork.

Following the short introductory pages which set the coastal scene, the bulk of the book comprises the species accounts. Most plants are given a half page spread with a superb photograph showing the plant’s jizz; a cropped photograph depicting key features, and a brief description under the headings of Height, Ecology & Natural History, Habitat, Flowers, Fruits and Leaves. There is also a panel describing status, including a thumbnail map of Britain with the overall distribution shaded in green. The thumbnails have to be taken with a pinch of salt as some of the maps are very misleading. For example, Lathyrus aphaca is depicted as widespread in Cornwall whereas, in reality, only one plant has been found in the last 30 years. Nevertheless, thumbnails are a good idea and mostly helpful. Some plants also have a panel showing a similar species. More use could have been made of this feature for plants that people frequently mistake, such as Trifolium dubium for Medicago lupulina, or to alert the reader to plants not otherwise covered, such as Reseda luteola. Over 600, predominantly native, species are included, although I totted up 30 missing coastal plants with little difficulty.

There are some very pleasing features such as a helpful photographic index on the inside flaps; a really nice map showing the British distribution of Limonium binervosum agg. group members, and a lovely explanation of the Spartina anglica story.

The nomenclature follows Stace ed. 4 (2019), apart from Cotoneaster from which Chaenopetalum has been split. The taxonomic order is a little wayward. The species descriptions begin with trees and shrubs and end with non-flowering plants. A selection of seaweeds, mosses and lichens is also included, although just three bryophytes seem pointless and certainly not worth highlighting on the back cover.

In a few instances the photographs do not match the descriptive text. Potentilla erecta is described as having four yellow petals whilst the main photograph shows one flower with five. Cochlearia danica has white petals according to the text and yet they are clearly their characteristic pale pink colour in the photographs. Frankenia laevis is described as restricted to the drier, upper reaches of saltmarshes whilst the photograph shows it growing on top of a sea wall.

Clearly a huge amount of time and effort has gone into producing this book, but proof reading by a very experienced field botanist would have been helpful in order to tighten up the descriptive text and iron out the niggly little things, such as describing Malva neglecta as upright or Lysimachia vulgaris as similar to Lysimachia arvensis. Nevertheless, for budding botanists visiting the coast, I would recommend carrying Francis Rose’s The Wild Flower Key in one pocket and this book in another. Use the keys and descriptive text in Rose in conjunction with the photographs in this field guide and you have the perfect combination!

William Collins, London, 2022; pp. x + 502, with many coloured figures, mainly photographs; hbk £65. ISBN 9780008304515

Trees – Volume 145 in the New Naturalist Library – is a very short title for a particularly large subject. (Having read it, I now know that the combined mass

of the Earth’s trees is nearly 700 gigatons, or 60% of all life-forms.) To be more precise, this is a book about tree physiology – how they live, die and generally regulate themselves as organisms. It is not a book about the natural and cultural history of trees (a subject treated magisterially by the late Oliver Rackham in the series’ 100th volume, Woodlands). Nor does it cover in any detail such subjects as tree identification, or the evolutionary relationships between the world’s trees.

This said, the subject matter remains unusually broad for the New Naturalist Library, and, printed as it is on the customary heavy-gauge paper, I was continually aware of just how much carbon the hardback version locks up. And there is still a slightly frantic sense of hastening from one sub-topic to the next: trees and climate change, diseases such as Ash Dieback, best practice when planting trees, or how trees cooperate with mycorrhizal fungi or with each other.

All this has the effect of making Trees a less engaging bed-time read than some of its slightly more populist rivals, such as Colin Tudge’s The Secret Life of Trees (Penguin, 2005). But it does make for an invaluably comprehensive textbook, from which even the most erudite reader seems bound to take away fascinating new facts. More than 500 references make it easy to explore any subject further, though inevitably a few of the things which most surprised me happen not to be referenced. (Did you know that a walnut, unlike other hardy trees, can lose 95% of its fine roots in a cold winter, or that alders, rather than being simply deciduous, continually replace their leaves, each of which may live for little more than a month?)

Peter Thomas is perfectly qualified to have written this book, both as a botanist (Emeritus Reader in Plant Ecology at Keele) and as an arboriculturist (he curates the remarkably comprehensive National Collection of flowering cherries on the campus). He is also widely travelled, and Trees draws again and again on personal observations and the author’s own photos of tree physiology from across the globe.

As such, this volume represents a departure within the New Naturalist Library, scarcely prioritising the small range of the world’s trees which grow wild in the UK. To have drawn exclusively on UK examples might actually have made for a more satisfyingly and practicably circumscribed book, but this would have been at the cost of omitting many mind-opening exotic examples of tree behaviour, and would have depended on the unlikely circumstance of our wild trees having each been subject to the relevant research.

Readers are probably bound to spot the odd misprint whenever they turn to their own areas of expertise, suggesting that Trees has not benefited from such a meticulous process of editorial review as additions to the New Naturalist Library might deserve. But it can still be wholeheartedly recommended for the elegance with which its prose elucidates some often complex science, and for the efficiency with which it turns to so many topics where we’ve discovered the answers (why is oak timber strongest when grown fast, and spruce timber when grown slowly?) without skipping those puzzles we’re yet to solve. Why do some trees turn red in autumn?

Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, BSBI Handbook No. 24, Durham, 2022; pp. 221, with many diagrams and coloured photographs; pbk £20.00. ISBN 9780901158567

BSBI Handbooks are getting ever more expansive, and this latest in the series, with 221 pages and covering just 20 species, is much more a monograph than a Handbook in the sense of an easily portable field identification manual that the series was originally intended to provide. As a monograph, it is generally extremely detailed and interesting, lavishly illustrated with photographs and with ingenious diagrams of leaf and stem pubescence by Jeremy Roberts. In several respects its taxonomy differs from the existing recent accounts of the genus in Britain. Lynes considers British records of A. acutidens, given with reservations in both Stace’s New Flora ed. 4 (2019) and Sell & Murrell’s Flora Vol. 2 (2014), and not mentioned in Hogarth’s Alchemilla Field Guide (2020), to belong to A. wichurae, and that the true species is confined to France. Of three species recently described by Hogarth but not validly published,

A. ‘cairnwellensis’ is equated with Lynes’s recently described A. sciura, and her A. ‘caledonica’ and A. ‘angusensis’ are synonymised under A. glabra. Three other species recently described by Lynes are treated: A. neomanifesta, A. mebii and A. falsadenta. Ten pages of discussion on A. minima conclude that it is not worthy of recognition.

The chief sections of the Handbook are a history of Alchemilla studies in Britain, including notably those by Max Walters and Margaret Bradshaw, ten pages on identification techniques, a key to species, and then, after the extremely detailed species accounts covering five to ten pages each, a stimulating appendix on potential species that one might hope to find in Britain, lists of synonyms, references and an index.

The species key seems unedited and contains several small incongruities and at least three confusing dichotomies: 2a should read ‘Central leaflets separate at base’ (the word ‘separate’ is missing); 13a reads perplexingly ‘Petioles with some or many deflexed hairs (both rare)’ and 13b says the petiole hairs are ‘not deflexed’, yet the description of A. subcrenata that 13a leads to says ‘Distinctively, at least some of the petioles on a plant will have a proportion of deflexed hairs’. In dichotomy 16, A. wichurae is separated from A. glomerulans and A. glabra by the leaf veins ‘angled at 45°’ versus ‘not routinely angled at 45°’, but this is compromised by most of the photos and partly by the descriptions. In addition, five rare species are unhelpfully not fully keyed.

I regret the absence of drawings, so valuable in giving the reader an idea of the gist of a species, but they have become increasingly less used throughout the Handbook series. The numerous photos for each species are, though, very helpful in showing the range of variation, especially of leaf shape and toothing. For the Alchemilla hunter in the right area, Hogarth’s Alchemilla: a Study of the Alchemilla Micro-species found in Northern Scotland (2019, nearly A4 with 58 pages) is brilliantly illustrated with mixed drawings and scans and is very useful, but the current Handbook is strongly recommended to anyone interested in the genus in Britain as a whole and will be an essential reference work for future Alchemilla taxonomy. It would be nice, though probably impossible because of the problems of the amount of variation within the species covered in the book, to have in addition a compact, shortened and pocketable version, with a corrected key, in the old Handbook format.

C & M Floristics, Middlewood Green, Suffolk, 2022; pp. xii + 804, with 32 monochrome plates and illustrations; plastic flexicover £30.00. ISBN 9781399919609 A long time in gestation, Stace’s Field Flora or ‘Baby Stace’ has now been reborn as the Concise Flora. True to its name, users should not expect lavish descriptions; it’s a strippedout version of the familiar Big Stace (Stace Ed. 4, 2019) but its advantages are apparent as soon as you pick it up. The lightweight paper is thin yet opaque for compactness and with a yellowed hue. This will prevent stooped backs and dazzled eyes in the sun whilst the tough plastic cover will ensure stalwarts can carry it on a wet day.

At the front of the book there is a dedication to Margaret, Clive’s late wife, who clearly did so much to bring it to fruition. As with Big Stace, it is first necessary to decide whether your specimen is a pteridophyte (fern or ally), gymnosperm (conifer) or angiosperm (flowering plant) and then follow a ‘general’ key leading to either genera in pteridophytes and gymnosperms, or families in angiosperms. The species identification keys remain intact but descriptions are omitted, so some botanical knowledge is required to avoid painstakingly keying out from first principles. However this should encourage, not deter, first time users!

Naturally, additional spacesavers have been employed; acknowledgements are excluded, the number of illustrations is reduced (those of Montia and Nasturtium seeds have been relocated to just before the glossary), there is no index to species (only genera and families, the latter in bold). In the keys the country of origin is omitted as are chromosome numbers (but let’s remember this is intended as a field Flora). One extra taxon has been added, the recently discovered fern Stenogrammitis myosuroides,

which has its own page at the back with an illustration by Fred Rumsey. I imagine that to rewrite the keys and repaginate would have unacceptably delayed publication.

Nomenclature follows the second reprint of Big Stace Ed. 4. Mercifully, there appears to be only a small number of scientific name changes from the first print run. These include, for example, Erodium aethiopicum which is back to E. lebelii (Sticky Stork’sbill) and Festuca brevipila which is now F. trachyphylla (Hard Fescue). Consequently, the Concise Flora is now the best reference for new plant names.

For English names, perhaps due to a habitat misnomer, Chalk Knapweed (Centaurea debeauxii) is now Slender Knapweed but less obvious is that Silver Knapweed (Centaurea cineraria) is now Silvery Knapweed (a plant already with many names).

By necessity, only the most diagnostic identification characters are given which aren’t always the easiest to see, measure or interpret. This means some backtracking in keys may be required when faced with morphologically similar species and consultation with Big Stace for additional clues where identification is debated.

Perhaps, as an abridged version of Big Stace, an opportunity to update some of the keys has been missed. The key to goosefoots is very confusing but we can blame the taxomonists here for jumbling up the many genera.

Distributions (and rarity status) have been helpfully kept but are sometimes dated. Gamochaeta purpurea (American Cudweed) is not naturalised in Surrey (although an increasing casual) and Herniaria ciliolata (Fringed Rupturewort) subsp. subciliata hasn’t been recorded in Jersey for years. The occasional use of a question mark can be found but this may have been useful in more cases, if only to encourage others to refind long-lost rarities. Habitat information is also retained in a reduced form. Errors are few and insignificant. Typos such as a missing ‘y’ in Crataegus rhipidophylla or authority errors (e.g. two Bromus hordeaceus subspecies lack naming authorities) do not detract from use. Two familiar synonyms are missing from the index (Haloragis and Sutera).

In summary, this is a longawaited and much-welcome standard field guide for the serious identification of plants. A whole generation of botanists seem unfamiliar with the last version published in 1999 so buy this without delay!

The Peloponnese in southern Greece has a typical Mediterranean climate with

mild, wet winters & hot, dry summers. Spring really starts in the autumn with the

coming of the rains; the first plants to flower are the many bulbs of the area.

We expect to see Colchicum, Cyclamen, Sternbergia, several species of Crocus, a Galanthus & possibly a Biarum as well. The focus of the holiday will be on finding & photographing the plants, & enjoying the other natural history in this beautiful autumn landscape, as well as soaking up the local culture.

The Cape Floral Kingdom has extraordinarily high diversity & endemism, & is home to over 9,000 vascular plant species. Many are associated with fynbos, a Mediterranean biome of woodlands & scrub where fire stimulates the flowering of orchids & bulbs. Of particular note are orchids in the genus Disa, which rival epiphytic orchids in variety & colour. Our aim is to see commoner species such as Disa cornuta, D. cylindrica & D. tenuifolia, but also look for rarer & fire-dependent species such as Acrolophia lunata, Disa atricapilla & D. bibiv valalv vatata,a, & & PacPachihitetes s bobodkdki in ni ii i amamo ongngs st t m ma an ny y ototh herers s. . £3,595 Greenwings are delighted to support BSBI with a donation of 10% of the profits from each booking on a flora-based holiday.