Customer Reviews

The Names of Plants

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

As a layman, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of every entry. However, this book seems to me to be full of information and quite well-researched. I wish the other reviewer here would give some example of the supposed inaccuracies. Perhaps the issue has arisen because etymology inevitably involves some guesswork, and is constantly being revised.

It is amazing that a publisher as prestigious as the Cambridge University Press allowed this to slip through. Didn't they think to have a qualified reviewer take a look at it? A browse through this book showed one grave error after another. How can anyone pretend to deal with nomenclature and not bother to check his writings with the Codes he writes about?

There is no point in discussing the merits of this book (if it has any) since there are so many errors that disqualify this. It should never have been allowed to reach print. Anybody interested in plants had better be warned against this. Give this a miss. If you do happen see any of its contents then don't believe anything in it, without checking against a reliable source.

For less money than this there is Stearn's Dictionary_of_plant_names_for_gardeners, which is not only an honest piece of work (I have yet to find even the most minute of errors) but also offers lots and lots more information. To put it mildly: if Gledhill's book were to be edited so as to eliminate the glaring errors then still Stearn's book would be five times better.