Another fabulous old book, one I’d seen featured in the Darwin library a few months ago.

This book, the Concise Australian Flora is by Leonard Cronin, and beautifully illustrated by Ruth Berry, Marion Westmacott, Jenny Taranto and Roslyn Devaux.

Published in 1989, it has been a good 3 decades and 3 years since its release, so there will be things that may be out of date. As a layperson naturalist (not someone who studied anything to do with biology or plants or ecology beyond high school), the main thing I noticed was that Dryandra were still well, listed as Dryandra species. They have been subsumed into the Banksia genus as of 2007, so that is definitely one difference.

There may be other such discrepancies, however this doesn’t matter to me because half the reason I enjoy books like this are the illustrations, and those do not disappoint.

Identification

A useful feature of the book is that the front cover has a basic key to help with identification.

The book does not claim to be a comprehensive guidebook to all Australian plants. It contains over 1000 species however with over 900 species of Eucalypts described today, it is clearly nowhere near all encompassing.

But that’s ok, because if there’s a plant you want to know more about, chances are it will get you close to the right genus anyway, and in the process you might find some other cool plants you might have seen elsewhere, or that you may not have known about.

Realistically though, today, in 2022, the reason I picked it up and pored over the pages is not for identification or information purposes. I would usually try google lens first, and then iNaturalist and apps/websites like EUCLID or look for more current, location-specific books like this awesome Perth Plants book.

Stunning Illustrations and Nostalgia

Why then? It is beautiful. The illustrations are beautiful.

Like the books in this other post on 3 out of print nature books that are beautiful, I love finding books like these in second-hand bookshops, people’s homes and libraries. They clearly took a lot of time and effort to put together, and it saddens me sometimes that these books are no longer accessible unless you’re lucky enough to stumble across a copy in a library or track one down to purchase at a second-hand bookstore/online marketplace.

I suppose like so many other things I’m nostalgic about, old coffee-table books like these have been added to the list. If nothing else, they introduce me to illustrators whose works I then look up, but more often than not, I learn something new.

They feel like a snapshot in time, and I’m always glad to find treasures like these and am so glad for the libraries out there, holding on to these treasures for the rest of us.

Here I’ve just shared some of the wonderful pages and illustrations from the book - every page is a gorgeous spread with a ton of stunning, painstakingly illustrated flora.