Sarah Raven's Wild Flowers [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.

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.

As soon as I saw this book, I knew that I would end up buying it. Before parting with my money, I did flick through one in a bookshop, and I was instantly captured by the presentation. It is a hefty book, more a coffee table book than anything else. But, it was not really produced to be a field guide or identification aid. WILD FLOWERS is very much a labour of love by Raven. She has chosen 50 of her favourite wild flowers to include in her tome, each organised by the typical habitat that you can encounter them in. Buckley's photographs compliment each entry, although there is only one picture of each plant covered. There are some double page spreads, and Raven has included the names of the flowers which are shown in these, but because they are more like landscape photographs, identification from those would be very tricky.

I think this book would make a great gift for someone who has a love of wild flowers, but perhaps already some knowledge of them. For a complete beginner, you may do well to consider a book like THE WILD FLOWER KEY as well, to aid them in identifying what they find. However, Raven's WILD FLOWERS would be a delight for anyone with an interest in this subject. I am so glad that I bought it. Havind said that it's not been produced as an identification guide, there have been a couple of flowers which I have managed to find in here without having any knowledge of what thet were before going to the book. At the end of the book, along with the index by Latin names, then common names, Raven has also included a glossary of the flowers by colour. This is a great idea, especially for those who may only have a little knowledge.

Highly recommended - it is something I will always treasure.