What a magnificent book! I'm really impressed. The photographs are just superb and I have been wondering how they did them. They have remarkable close up photographs of all sorts of botanical curiosities but for me the wonder is that they have incredible depth of field with their focus. I suspect they must have taken a series of photos with slightly different points of focus and then stacked the resulting images to produce a composite image. But maybe they have just used a large format camera and very small apertures. Anyway, the book is worth buying just for the photos.
The book is structured around a series of sections covering: roots, stems and branches, leaves, flowers and seeds and fruits and they manage to give a pretty good coverage. The scholarship is impressive too......oh....and it is very well edited. I didn't notice any typos or poorly worded sections. So full marks to the editors.
It's not a botanical text book in the sense of having great depth on all aspects of botany but it is a great introduction and I shall be trying to convince my son to tear himself away from his iphone games for a few hours to read it.
I did find myself occasionally wishing that they had a bit more explanation or a few more pictures. (For example, on p320-321 I would actually have liked to see a picture of an achene in flight ....likewise on p 318, I would have liked to see a picture of one of the seeds with its papery parachute). But, on the whole these are minor criticisms for what is really a lovely book. Five stars from me. ( )