Book Reviews

BOOK REVIEWS

THE HOOKERS OF KEW by

MEA

ALLAN

author of 'The Tradescants' [Published by Michael Joseph, at 50/-) FLORA OF HERTFORDSHIRE by

D R . JOHN G .

DONY

(.Published by Hitchen Museum and Art Gallery, at 42/-) These two books published in early months of 1967 make the year one of great interest and importance to botanists.

Miss Allan's book is a biography, lively and well written, of a father and son—Sir William Jackson Hooker and Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker—both East Anglians. The former became Director of Kew when the royal pleasure ground was taken over by the State and the vast Palm House and Temperate House were built.

His son travelled the world to stock the Gardens and Herbarium, finding tiny 'Arctic' plants at 17,000 feet in the Himalayas and the tiny Rhododendron of the Snows at 18,000 feet. At 19,300 feet he was, he says "a gone coon" from mountain sickness.

He joined Captain Ross's expedition to the Antarctic and visited and collected plants on the way there in Madeira, St. Helena, Kerguelen Island, and Cape of Good Hope.

He was an officer on the Erebus with the rank of Surgeon.

All this makes lively reading in addition to family history and work at Kew. Dr. Dony's book on the other hand, it seems to me, sets up a new high Standard for County Floras, daunting to the courage of any botanist who would propose to do the same for his own County.

There is an historical introduction telling of the work of earlier botanists of Hertfordshire from William Turner (who died in 1568) onwards.

There follow habitat studies of the natural regions of the County and maps showing all aspects affecting a flora—altitude, rainfall, river system, and geological features. Most thorough and painstaking of all—a new feature in such floras—distribution

410 Transactions of the Suffolk Naturalists',

Vol. 13, Part 6

maps on 2 km. X 2 km. squares of some 696 common species.

The distribution of less common species is given in the text. These alone make it quite an accomplishment in the fourteen years since Dr. Dony's Flora of Bedfordshire was published in 1953.

Dr. Dony is now President-elect of the Botanical Society of the British Isles.

J.C.N.W.

COMPANION TO FLOWERS by

DAVID

MCCLINTOCK

(.Published by G. Bell & Sons, at 30/-) Those of us who have benefited from "The Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers",—and who has not?—will be anxious to have David McClintock's "Companion to Flowers".

This book has distilled in it all those odd scraps of interesting information that are passed on from one botanist to another culled from all their reading. Here it is all together and a fascinating collection it is. He teils the stories of those early botanists who found and named our flora and shows what a motley Company they are.

He points out the importance of botanical Latin and the signicance of the initial or abbreviation after the generic and specific name. He is often against the use of a small letter for the specific name as has been the practice since 1956 and to those of us whose knowledge is much less than Mr. McClintock's his position is very much more helpful. No better example can be given than his own of Canterbury Bell (Campanula Medium). Medium is not an adjective failing to agree in gender with its noun, when it would be Campanula media, but a noun—a former name for a Canterbury Bell, and so the two nouns are in apposition, a fact that is readily apparent when a capital letter is used for a specific name derived from a proper noun. In this he differs from Dr. Stearn's "Botanical Latin" and from most common usage today.

His style is mostly informal and pleasant, but his use of unexpected parentheses sometimes disturbs the rhythm of a passage.

Here is a book that everyone interested in Wild Flowers should own. Should you buy one as a present for a friend you will probably find that you cannot part with it and have to buy another present

D.J.M.