Childrens Toyshop
Welcome to The Childrens Toyshop, here you will find all the latest and traditional toys in our toyshop. You can search and locate the best selling Toys Games & Puzzles to purchase online and have delivered to the door. We have a large selection of Books with reviews.
Back to Home Page > Go back a page
Books : Flora Britannica: The Definitive New Guide to Britain's Wild Flowers, Plants and Trees
See Larger Image |
Flora Britannica: The Definitive New Guide to Britain's Wild Flowers, Plants and Trees by: Richard Mabey List Price: £35.00 Childrens Toy Shop Price: £22.75 You Save: £12.25 (35%)Prices subject to change. |
|
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover Dewey Decimal Number: 582 EAN: 9781856193771 ISBN: 1856193772 Label: Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd Manufacturer: Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 480 Publication Date: October 07, 1996 Publisher: Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd Studio: Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd Sales Rank: 13715 Related Items:
Related Items:      see moreBrowse for similar items by category:
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Root and BranchI recall hearing Richard Mabey discussing this book on a radio show, before it was published and thinking its premise: collecting contibutors' personal experiences of British plant life, seemed rather uninspired. Surely this kind of thing has been done to death? Nature magazine columns have been filled for years with people writing accounts of things they have seen in the British countryside. When it was published, I was further put off by the high price of the book. I was completely wrong on both counts, the price, when the size, scope and quality of the book are considered, seems more than reasonable. As to the premise of the work, Richard Mabey, a genius writer in my opinion, pulls all the various accounts from amateur ... Read More: Rating: - mistitled but funIt is true that this has to be one of the worse titled books of all time. A FLORA in any sense here should be an identification guide and it isn't that at all - it is a personal exploration of various plants concentrating not necessarily on the most important but on those for which the author has an affection for or simply information on. The main interests are folklore and distribution - industry and use and even literature get short shrift, oddly. It is true too that plant introductions are widely covered, but the distinction in terms of salience would be rather misleading (do we miss out horse-chstnut?...). The joy of this book which frankly does NOT look as though it was twenty years (flap) in the making is the writing and out of the way sources ... Read More: Rating:  - Serious misdescriptionFlora Britannica may be a fine book for what it is, as an essay or encyclopedia about British plants, but it is NOT what the title and description clearly imply - a comprehensive identification guide. I myself was misled by this, and indeed by the uncritical acceptance of this blatant misrepresentation by reviewers, and ordered a copy, only to find on opening it that it wasn't at all the comprehensive identification guide that I wanted - and so I'm returning it. A slapped wrist for the publisher, presumably the author, and for Amazon for not checking that the book contents match the meaning of the title and description of the work! Publishers of nature books generally are being given far too much licence to misrepresent certain books in such ... Read More: Rating:  - Not for the serious horticulturistI was thinking for some positives to write on this book and not much came to mind. It is a perfectly fine book. However the name flora brittanica indicates the plants in this book ought to be indiginous to this land but a great number of them are not. So the author spends time telling us about plants that have been brought over here in the last 100 - 200 years which is of no interest to anyone who is interested in FLORA BRITTANICA. Consequently what could have been a book containing a greater source of information on the fewer number of truly native species becomes a book with little information on a grater number of introduced species. Some of our native species aren't even worthy of a photograph where as japanese knotweed gets 2 photographs all because ... Read More: Rating: - A good book overallThis is a very good encyclopedia, with a lot of information about the history and uses of the various plants found in Britain. My only criticism is that the pictures show the plants in their natural habitat rather than close up. This means it is sometimes difficult to identify the plant from the picture. After saying that, this book is not a hady field guide that you would carry round anyway. It being 400+ pages. As a home fererence work, I can reccomend it, and I have spent ages browsing through it's pages discovering interesting things about the plants that are all arround us. Paul |
|