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Product Description
Review
An epic and beautiful volume, which I will be poring over with my children, and pressing many flowers between its pages. -- Robert Macfarlane Impressive, beautiful to look at and truly a labour of love Sunday Times
Product Description
Inspired by childhood excursions with her botanist father, Sarah Raven has travelled the length and breadth of the British Isles to find 500 of our most breathtakingly beautiful wild flowers. This lavishly illustrated book is divided byhabitat, covering woods, downs and dales, lanes and hedgerows, meadows, coast, marshes and streams, moors and mountains, and wasteland. Sarah introduces a wide range of plants, telling you theirnames and something about them - how to identify thefamilies, how they're brilliantly adapted to their environment, theirimportance to animals and insects, what herbal remedies they can beused for, the story behind their common names and the part they play inlocal history. Join Sarah on trips to see pulsatillas, fritillaries, bluebells, wildgarlic, harebells, forget-me-nots, foxgloves, wood spurge, silverweed,purple cranesbill, deadly nightshade, St John's wort, comfrey, orchids,wood sorrel, snowdrops and more. There are glorious landscape photographs by Jonathan Buckley throughout, and one of his stunning plant portraits accompanies each of Sarah's authoritative, captivating species descriptions. Informative and lovely, Sarah Raven's Wild Flowers is a botanical marvel.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
58 of 61 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is a sumptuous Bloomsbury volume, weighty, luxurious and with a bright green cloth spine which clashes brilliantly with the bright pink endpapers inside. It's printed on thick paper and has gorgeous photos by Jonathan Buckland. But is it a good book about wild flowers?
It certainly seems somewhat undecided about what kind of book it actually IS. It's not a flora, that should be made clear from the start. By that, I mean, it's not a plant identification book. It's arranged by habitats, yes, such as Woods, Coast and Meadow, but each plant gets only a single photo (in most cases) and that won't be adequate to give you a concrete ID. (And some have very pretty photos that I wouldn't recognise the plant from! For example Cuckoo Flower, which in my experience is a bigger bloom.)
It's also not a botany book, and nor is it a gardening book, or a natural history book exactly. And it's not very comprehensive - most wild flower books include well over a thousand species, sometimes up to 1500, and this has only five hundred. AND some of those are grasses, which wouldn't appear in a normal flora...
This book's actual strengths take time to sink in, and time to grow on the reader. Sarah Raven is one of our best gardening writers, and she grew up botanising with her dad. In a way, this is a very personal (and possibly slightly self-indulgent?) book where she wanders around giving us her own personal take on the wild flowers she sees as she travels. And it's slowly, surprisingly, very seductive. Especially if you already know a little about wild flowers, and want to turn the pages, seeing old favourites, learning a few new things about each, drinking in the gorgeous pictures, noting in particular a bit of the very good ecological detail about what each flower generally grows with. There are lots of entries on non-native things which now grow in the wild in the UK, too, which I rather enjoy: it's an inclusive definition of 'wild'.
I think the whole book could lose, without any trouble, the rather un-useful botanical descriptions, which will be really hard to use without illustrations, and distribution and habitat notes. But the writing by Raven herself, when she gets going, is delicious. Pasqueflowers 'scatter themselves over chalky pastures, lying there like beautiful girls at the end of the dance". Ahh!
DON'T buy this book for anyone who is a novice and wants to identify wild flowers. Buy it instead as a sumptuous and beautiful gift for someone who already loves the subject. I don't know why I like this book so much really, but I do. You just want to keep reading, keep turning the pages, and keep thinking about the spring and summer to come.
It certainly seems somewhat undecided about what kind of book it actually IS. It's not a flora, that should be made clear from the start. By that, I mean, it's not a plant identification book. It's arranged by habitats, yes, such as Woods, Coast and Meadow, but each plant gets only a single photo (in most cases) and that won't be adequate to give you a concrete ID. (And some have very pretty photos that I wouldn't recognise the plant from! For example Cuckoo Flower, which in my experience is a bigger bloom.)
It's also not a botany book, and nor is it a gardening book, or a natural history book exactly. And it's not very comprehensive - most wild flower books include well over a thousand species, sometimes up to 1500, and this has only five hundred. AND some of those are grasses, which wouldn't appear in a normal flora...
This book's actual strengths take time to sink in, and time to grow on the reader. Sarah Raven is one of our best gardening writers, and she grew up botanising with her dad. In a way, this is a very personal (and possibly slightly self-indulgent?) book where she wanders around giving us her own personal take on the wild flowers she sees as she travels. And it's slowly, surprisingly, very seductive. Especially if you already know a little about wild flowers, and want to turn the pages, seeing old favourites, learning a few new things about each, drinking in the gorgeous pictures, noting in particular a bit of the very good ecological detail about what each flower generally grows with. There are lots of entries on non-native things which now grow in the wild in the UK, too, which I rather enjoy: it's an inclusive definition of 'wild'.
I think the whole book could lose, without any trouble, the rather un-useful botanical descriptions, which will be really hard to use without illustrations, and distribution and habitat notes. But the writing by Raven herself, when she gets going, is delicious. Pasqueflowers 'scatter themselves over chalky pastures, lying there like beautiful girls at the end of the dance". Ahh!
DON'T buy this book for anyone who is a novice and wants to identify wild flowers. Buy it instead as a sumptuous and beautiful gift for someone who already loves the subject. I don't know why I like this book so much really, but I do. You just want to keep reading, keep turning the pages, and keep thinking about the spring and summer to come.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
The pictures are really well chosen to illustrate growth form and habitat, and are thoroughly supported by all the information needed on taxonomy and anatomy, without being boring! The grouping by habitat is much more practical use than the plant family used by so many standard floras. The only problem is the physical weight of the book, but certainly worth it. When it is raining and cold outside, the book is a delightful escape to a beautiful world, as well as being useful and stimulating.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
What a great book. Originally I bought this for my mum but ended keeping the copy and ordering another one for her. The subject is very well researched and the photography is stunning. I highly recommend this book!
Most Recent Customer Reviews
A festival of flowers
A great companion to maybey's Flora Brittanica. Beautiful photographs and an engaging text. Not so much a book to help you identify wild flowers, although it can help there, but... Read more
Published 15 days ago by Hempnall
Beautiful
A really lovely book with wonderful photographs. I bought this for my friend for her birthday as she loves gardens and walking and she was as thrilled with it as me. Read more
Published 1 month ago by M. Greenslade
awesome!
This is an awesome book. I am soooo glad I bought it, even though it was quite pricey it is worth every penny. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Hannah Nunn
Sumptuous is the word
This is an absolutely beautiful volume, lovely thick quality paper. The photos are gorgeous and the writing lively and personal in a way that keeps it interesting. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Loulou
Amazing photography
What a stunning book! The photography just blew me away and Sarah's enthusiasm for wild flowers shines through on every page. Thoroughly recommend it.
Published 3 months ago by Ladylawn
Sarah Raven Wild Flowers
A particularly good book about wild flowers, packed with useful information and beautiful photography. Arrived in time for Christmas, which was perfect.
Published 4 months ago by Juliet
nothing but pleasure
Nothing but praise for every aspect of this purchase.
Delivery, condition, content and photographs,... Read more
Delivery, condition, content and photographs,... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Molls
wild flowers
The book was received promptly and in good condition. The book itself is comprehensive and gives a good overview of the subject. Some of the pictures are spectacular.
Published 4 months ago by harpenden
Great coffee table book
This has been bought as a gift - sumptuous photos and a really nice browsing book for a flower fan.
Published 5 months ago by Karenmitten
A note of caution
I sense words missing from the title, it ought to be The Wonderful World of Wild Flowers, or Sarah Raven's Wild Flowers: a lumpy, curiously scatty book full of bits and pieces of... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Alan Tucker
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