Customer Reviews

Flowering Plant Families of the World

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The predecessor of this book, Flowering Plants of the World, was a well-known reference for decades to many who love plants. There is a strong sense of continuity between these two books, if for no other reason that both use the same illustrations. In fact the continuity goes further and also involves much of the contents, as evidenced by the error of zebrawood being supplied by a species of Connarus, a myth that was debunked in the 1940's.

Where the earlier book was based on the Cronquist system, with the plant families arranged by order, this book is (loosely) based on APG II (2003), with the plant families arranged by alphabet. As to recognition of families, this book adopts a splitter's philosophy, recognizing 506 families (versus 457 in APG II). The book recognizes families such as Bombacaceae, Cneoraceae, Sterculiaceae and Tiliaceae. The classification in this book will not be found in any other reference, but this splitter's policy may help the book retain its value in these times of constant change in plant classification.

This is a massive book with large and beautiful illustrations. The information about the families includes distribution, major genera, number of species, morphological description, placement in the plant kingdom, intrafamilial classification and economic uses. Most of the family descriptions have also illustrations and references are given. The authors have adopted an approach to accept paraphyly in some cases.

However, there are some small drawbacks. The glossary does not contain the whole terminology used in the book. In the family descriptions, there are not few small errors, for example in the distributional information. In some cases the distribution of a given family in the map even differs from that in the text. There are this kind of small errors particularly in the descriptions written by V. H. Heywood. Also, I would have liked to find some basics of ecology of the families, but even pollination mechanism is mostly not given.

This is an impressive, dense, fact-filled book with wonderful illustrations and distribution maps. It is as useful for plant biologists as it is for anyone else, whether you are interested in evolutionary relationships of plants, or just simply wondering where certain foods come from. Citations are acknowledged along with each family description for quick reference to the primary literature.

This is a must have for botany teachers and students. It is a complete and beautiful book, full of illustrations and the VERY useful distribution maps. It has current scientific information on families systematic and diagnostic characters. It is a helpful tool to teach Angiosperm diversity in University courses. It presents the APG II classification but the families are alphabetically arranged. Dicots and monocots are separated to facilitate the search. It also has a complete glossary with botanical terminology to facilitate the comprehension of the book. It is a great book for both specialists and botany aficionados alike.

This textbook is very interesting for me. Many informations such as plant classification in the world, plant illustration, plant description on the families level, the definition about plant etc. that i can get from this book.