The Mediterranean – a land of blues skies, warm sunshine, rugged mountains and azure seas. Yet this familiar image conceals another Mediterranean – a secret landscape populated by a dazzling variety of wild flowers and plants, from spectacular orchids and ancient olive trees to delicate snowdrops and hardy cacti. Following on from their widely acclaimed Flora of the Silk Road, Chris and Basak Gardner present a stunning selection of 600 of the finest wild flowers that grow in the Mediterranean regions of the world. Travelling across five continents – Europe, North America, Africa, South America and Australia – the authors reveal the rich botanical profusion that makes up the flora of the Mediterranean regions of the world. For each region, a succession of the most outstanding flowers is featured, from the spectacular and exotic to the beautiful yet familiar, with each plant presented in its natural habitat. Beginning with the countries of the Mediterranean Basin, the reader is taken along the rugged Atlas Mountains, through Andalucía and Italy, to arrive at the amazing botanical richness of Greece, southern Anatolia and Jordan. In California and Chile the journey is through flowering deserts, snow-capped peaks and towering forests of redwood and monkey puzzle trees, beside a coast lapped by the Pacific Ocean. The ancient landscapes of Southern Australia provide a truly remarkable assemblage of astonishing flora, whilst the Western Cape of South Africa is home to an unimaginable diversity of flora. The accompanying text provides descriptions of the species, plant families and their distribution, as well as offering guidance to those wishing to photograph plants in the wild. With 600 stunning colour photographs, and presenting a breadth of flora never before brought together in a single volume, the authors offer a unique window on the floral wonders of the Mediterranean world.

This timely and comprehensive update of the original text integrates a diverse and scattered literature to produce a synthetic account of Mediterranean plant evolutionary ecology. It maintains the accessible style of its previous version whilst incorporating recent work in the context of a new structural framework.

This is the third volume in a series of six and contains accounts of the first 48 families of dicotyledons, including many well known trees. The series is a manual for the accurate identification of cultivated ornamental plants throughout the world, concentrating specifically on Europe.

The European Garden Flora is the definitive manual for the accurate identification of cultivated ornamental flowering plants. Designed to meet the highest scientific standards, the vocabulary has nevertheless been kept as uncomplicated as possible so that the work is fully accessible to the informed gardener as well as to the professional botanist. This new edition has been thoroughly reorganised and revised, bringing it into line with modern taxonomic knowledge. Although European in name, the Flora covers plants cultivated in most areas of the United States and Canada as well as in non-tropical parts of Asia and Australasia. Volume 2 contains accounts of the first 71 families of Dicotyledons, including the Aizoaceae and Cactaceae (large and important families of succulents), as well as many tree families (Juglandaceae, Betulaceae, Fagaceae, Ulmaceae) and popular herbaceous plants (Ranunculaceae, Papaveraceae, Cruciferae).

This volume contains a complete systematic treatment of the flowering plant order Asterales. This comprises 12 families with approx. 1,720 genera and about 26,300 species. Identification keys are provided for all genera, and likely phylogenetic relationships are discussed extensively. The wealth of information contained in this volume makes it an indispensable source for all working in the fields of pure and applied plant sciences.

A large-format, beautifully illustrated, complete guide to gardening in a California and Mediterraean-like climates, defined as ones in which winters are wet and summers are bone dry.

Plants have cultural histories, as their applications change over time and with place. Some plant species have affected human cultures in profound ways, such as the stimulants tea and coffee from the Old World, or coca and quinine from South America. Even though medicinal plants have always attracted considerable attention, there is surprisingly little research on the interface of ethnobotany and medical anthropology. This volume, which brings together (ethno-)botanists, medical anthropologists and a clinician, makes an important contribution towards filling this gap. It emphasises that plant knowledge arises situationally as an intrinsic part of social relationships, that herbs need to be enticed if not seduced by the healers who work with them, that herbal remedies are cultural artefacts, and that bioprospecting and medicinal plant discovery can be viewed as the epitome of a long history of borrowing, stealing and exchanging plants.