This book is an important contribution to the cultural heritage of southern Africa and Lesotho. For the first time, all the Sesotho names for plants and animals are included in one volume, which also accurately records all the plants that are known to be used by the Basotho for food, medicine and traditional practices, together with their correct botanical identities. It will undoubtedly become a standard reference work and valuable resource for future students and academics.
Comprehensive descriptive account of the Hypoxidaceae, Tecophilaeaceae, Asphodelaceae, Aloaceae, Hemerocallidaceae native and naturalised in Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana and the Caprivi Strip.
Covering the flowering plants, this is a companion volume to the first book which covered the gymnosperms and dicotyledons, thus completing the seed plant flora of Singapore (the seed plants being composed of gymnosperms and angiosperms). Included are 34 families and approximately 750 species of plants and some 350 illustrations. List of family names, keys to the families of monocotyledons and a name index are included.
When Rolf Dahlgren and I embarked on preparing this book series, Rolf took prime responsibility for monocotyledons, which had interested him for a long time. After finishing his comparative study and family classification of the mono cots, he devoted much energy to the acquisition and editing of family treatments for the present series. After his untimely death, Peter Goldblatt, who had worked with him, continued to handle further incoming monocot manuscripts until, in the early 1990s, his other obligations no longer allowed him to continue. At that time, some 30 manuscripts in various states of perfection had accumulated, which seemed to form a solid basis for a speedy completion of the FGVP monocots; with the exception of the grasses and orchids which would appear in separate volumes. I felt a strong obligation to do everything to help in publishing the manuscripts that had been put into our hands. I finally decided to take charge of them personally, although during my life as a botanist I had never seriously been interested in mono cots.
The culmination of more than fifty years of research by the foremost living expert on plant classification, Diversity and Classification of Flowering Plants is an important contribution to the field of plant taxonomy. In the last decade, the system of classifying plants has been thoroughly revised. Instead of describing every individual family, Takhtajan includes descriptions in keys to families, which he calls "descriptive keys." The advantage of descriptive keys is that they give both the characteristic features of the families and their differences. The delimitation of families and orders drastically differs from the one accepted by the Englerian school and from the one accepted in Arthur Cronquist's system. Takhtajan favors the smaller, more natural families and orders, which are more coherent and better-defined, where characters are easily grasped, and which are more suitable for information retrieval and phylogenetic studies, including cladistic analysis (because it reduces polymorphic codings).
The New Manual of Vascular Plants of Northeastern United States and Adjacent Canada is a project by The New York Botanical Garden to fully revise and update the classic Manual by Gleason and Cronquist (1991, NYBG Press). As family treatments are completed for the New Manual, these are being made available as downloadable PDFs. The chief goal of the New Manual is to enable identification of all plants growing spontaneously in a vast region (portions or entirety of 22 states and 5 Canadian provinces). The New Manual includes new tools for plant identification for about 5300 species, amounting to 25% of the total botanical diversity of North America north of Mexico. Approximately 20% of the species included are additions to the 1991 Gleason and Cronquist Manual. In addition, the New Manual provides information on morphology, ecology, phenology, geographic distributions, and conservation status for each species. The New Manual will be indispensable to all those interested in North America's rich botanical resources, including students, conservationists, wildlife managers, educators, and gardeners.
Armen Takhtajan is among the greatest authorities in the world on the evolution of plants. This book culminates almost sixty years of the scientist's research of the origin and classification of the flowering plants. It presents a continuation of Dr. Takhtajan’s earlier publications including “Systema Magnoliophytorum” (1987), (in Russian), and “Diversity and Classification of Flowering Plants” (1997), (in English). In his latest book, the author presents a concise and significantly revised system of plant classification (‘Takhtajan system’) based on the most recent studies in plant morphology, embryology, phytochemistry, cytology, molecular biology and palynology. Flowering plants are divided into two classes: class Magnoliopsida (or Dicotyledons) includes 8 subclasses, 126 orders, c. 440 families, almost 10,500 genera, and no less than 195,000 species; and class Liliopsida (or Monocotyledons) includes 4 subclasses, 31 orders, 120 families, more than 3,000 genera, and about 65,000 species.This book contains a detailed description of plant orders, and descriptive keys to plant families providing characteristic features of the families and their differences.
