Leonard Cronin

This really could be retitled 'Key Guide to the Trees of the Eastern States with Some Cameos From Other States.' This, like many other '(insert natural thing) of Australia' books, suffers from being myopically focused on the Eastern States. This would be fine, except that in particular, Western Australia is one of the biodiversity hotspots in the world, with 50-80% endemic flora species, yet gets only about 60~ entries out of about 312 overall. I wouldn't recommend this book if you lived in the Northern Territory, South Australia, Western Australia or Tasmania. Western Australia has the largest and healthiest temperate woodland on the Earth at about 40,000,000 acres, but you wouldn't know it from this book, lol).

The illustrations are very beautiful. It really is a book only intended to expedite visual identification (which is handy), and doesn't teach or impart any information on the life-cycle habits of trees, interesting evolutionary features. The indexing isn't very handy for people new to tree identification, and presumably this book is meant to be catering to them as well, and the map locations are really quite tiny. I've used other identification handbooks that gave more page space to the map, which is very useful.

This is also by no means a complete guide. We have around 60 unique species of Banksia in the south west of Western Australia, granted not all have tree habits, but the book only looks at about 6-7 and misses the rest. I feel like this book could have been more robust, or alternatively, more frank about its Eastern States bias.

Imho, stick to FloraBase for now. It's free.… (más)