Welsh Journals

BOOK REVIEW EXCURSION FLORA OF THE BRITISH ISLES. A. R. Clapham, T. G. Tutin and E. F. Warburg. Cambridge University Press. 1959. 22s. 6d. The big Flora of the British Isles by the same authors has become a standard item of botanical equipment-no doubt rightly, for it is not equalled by any other book on its subject. Yet it has, perhaps, one outstanding fault its bulkiness, which makes it unsuitable for field use unless one has a spacious rucksack. The new Excursion Flora solves this problem of size. It is virtually the Fl. Br. Is. reduced to 71 X 5 X f in., mainly by the omission of all rare species from the text. But this reduction has not made the Excursion Flora an addition to the stream of unnecessary wild flower books. The set of keys, which was one of the most useful features of the Fl. Br. Is., has been transferred almost complete to the new book, and for the rarer species excluded from the text there are now more detailed references in the keys. The result should please everyone. The beginner, perhaps exploring the botanically tame hedgerows near his home, will not have to wade through a mass of data about adventives, which were such a conspicuous feature of the accounts of the Cruciferae and Compositae in the Fl. Br. Is., or about rare Scottish alpines. The more advanced botanist will be glad to have Clapham, Tutin and Warburg's masterpiece, and especially their keys, in a handy form. Comparison of this book with the Fl. Br. Is. shows that some improvements have been made to the descriptions. The "tubers" of Eleocharis parvula are now better described as "resting buds", and estuarine mud is a better description of the habitat of this species, at least in Wales, than the former wet sandy places near the sea". Eleocharis quinqueflora (pauciflora) no longer has style-base en- larged a character that was confusing to anyone who had learned from Bentham and Hooker, as so many have, to distinguish this species by its lack of an enlarged style-base. In the Hypericum key Plant hairy, at least on underside of lvs is an improvment on the ambiguous Plant pubescent, at least on the Ivs beneath". Car- damine hirsuta is now more correctly described as usually having 4 stamens it does quite often have 5 or 6 early in the season. And 10-20 mm. is a more realistic size for a wild gooseberry than the 10-20 cm. of the Fl. Br. Is. On the other hand, neither the wavy leaves nor the red-tinted petals of Hypericum undulatum, its most obvious field characters, are mentioned nor are the barren shoots and arrangement of the flowers of Salicornia perennis, which are more important than fl. spikes almost truncate The absence of any reference to whether achenes are glabrous or hairy in Senecio seems neglect of a useful dis- tinguishing character. In Polystichum "Lvs I-pinnate. P. lonchitis repeated from the Fl. Br. Is., will probably cause botanists