and they and their garden will benefit from understanding the wealth of information that has hitherto lain hidden within the mysterious world of Latin names. I enjoyed going through this book, but it didn’t have many of the Latin names for the plants I grow.

With these books as the background to Parker’s shortened, modern version of a dictionary, we can be confident of his reliability.This allows gardeners to make new connections and discoveries in a way standard alphabetical lists don’t permit. RHS Latin for Gardeners is an informative, entertaining and beautifully illustrated unravelling of the mysteries of botanical Latin. Most of us are not Latin scholars or indeed trained botanists but, day by day, we need to consult and understand the meaning of both the generic and species names for our plants.

His carefully chosen alphabetical plant lists are useful once the reader has established the relevant chapter. It's going to take some time to properly enjoy it, and it's also one that I will keep by my chair to refer to often. Individual plants are also profiled throughout, showing how their names can illuminate their hidden histories. Overall a very good quality service from this seller and I would not hesitate to recommend this seller. Best of all it is used globally so the confusion created by local names or foreign languages is no longer a problem.And they aren’t so difficult to understand once you remember many words we use everyday come from Latin. I might have enjoyed this more if I wasn’t simultaneously reading The Gardener’s Botanical, which is more recent and comprehensive (both books are published by Quarto Publishing, so I'm guessing The Gardener’s Botanical is the updated version). I learned the proper naming convention for plant labels, Genus (uppercase) and species (lowercase) in italics, followed by common name all in lowercase, e. While it is not a book to sit down and read from cover to cover, the pages that highlight different plants or explain different types of plant names make for a nice mix of pleasure reading to go with the reference material. Evolved over many centuries and often thought to belong to the rarefied world of scholars and scientists, this invented language is in fact a very useful tool for everyday gardening.