Hydrophyllaceae, Gentianaceae, Afrika

The Smallest Kingdom is an illustrated account of the botanical exploration of South Africa's Cape Floral Kingdom and the plants that this region has given to the gardens of the world over the last four centuries. Over Kew's 250 year history, Cape plants and their collectors have contributed greatly to the establishment of the Royal Botanic Gardens,Kew as the pre-eminent centre for botanical research. The book is illustrated throughout with full colour botanical paintings, and will appeal to conservationists, gardeners, botanists, historians, botanical artists, naturalists, and visitors to the Cape.

The theory of ecological convergence underlies the biogeographers' maps of world biome-types. It also determines the degree to which ecological principles, derived from research on particular populations, communities or ecosystems, are generally valid, and hence also to what extent resource management principles are general. To quote Di Castri and Mooney (1973): "In effect, in order to assess the transfer of technology, it is essential to know to what extent information acquired from studying one particular ecosystem is applicable to another ecosystem of the same type but situated in a different location. " The five relatively small, isolated, mediterranean-climate zones of the earth, each with its distinct fauna and flora, have provided the ideal testing grounds for this theory. A heritage of precisely focused ecosystems research has resulted, beginning with the international comparative analyses conducted by Specht (l969a, b) but with antecedents in earlier studies in South Australia (Specht and Rayson 1957, Specht 1973). Cody and Mooney (1978) reviewed the information available at the time for the four zones excepting Australia and concluded that the arrays of strategy-types to be found among the different biotas were so similar that they could be explained only in terms of the convergence hypothesis; nevertheless, evident differences in community organization and dynamics, especially phenol ogy, required closer study of resource availability and resource-use patterns to better explain relations between form and function overall, and to assess the degree of convergence at higher levels of organization than the population.

South Africa's Cape Floristic Region includes approximately 8,500 plant species. Most of this biodiversity is concentrated in fynbos, a fire-prone shrubland occurring on the sandy, infertile soils which predominate in this region.This book reviews a decade of rigorous research into the biogeography, ecology and management of fynbos, carried out under the auspices of the Fynbos Biome Project.

Flora of Madeira is the first book to describe fully all of the vascular plants of the Madeiran and Salvage Islands. It covers over 1360 species of native and naturalized plants, many of them little known. A high proportion of taxa, some 16%, are endemic to the islands themselves or are restricted to Macaronesia (the collective name for the archipelagos of the Azores, Madeira, Salvages, Canaries and Cape Verdes). Isolated from other land-masses, the Madeiran islands are botanically rich and diverse, and the rugged and beautiful landscape embraces a broad range of habitats. Madeira also contains the most extensive remaining areas of laurisilva, the evergreen forest which is the last representative of the ancient Tethyan forests of S. Europe and N. Africa. The remote Salvage Islands have a smaller but equally interesting flora. Flora provides descriptions and keys for taxa at all levels, as well as information on habitats, distributions and flowering times. Local names are also cited. Fifty-seven plates of original drawings illustrate 212 of the Madeiran and Macaronesian endemic taxa, some of them depicted for the first time. Introductory chapters describe the geography of the islands, the main vegetation types and the extensive measures being implemented to conserve this unique flora. Flora of Madeira is the only fully comprehensive publication on the wild flora of the Madeiran and Salvage Islands, for use as both a reference work and a field guide. This book is a digital reprint of ISBN 0-11-310017-5 (1994).