This third edition of Horst Marschner's classic text Mineral Nutrition of Higher Plants, updated by 29 experts due to his untimely death in 1996, is a handsome hardback volume with more elegant layout (A4 size with double columns), and that is perhaps the most striking thing about the revision. For this alone it is worth updating your copy of the second edition, or if the text is new to you, getting your hands on the best book in the subject area. What is somewhat surprising is that the book content differs little since the 1995 edition, with just some updating of terms of structure, figures and tables, with a light modernisation of the text and associated references.

The text covers the main macro- and micronutrients, moving from soils, rhizosphere, plant biochemistry and whole plant ecophysiology. Non-essential elements that are assimilated by plants, and which can be somewhat problematic to plants and to the food chains reliant on them, have a more limited coverage. As these non-essential elements interact with essential ones, they could maybe have been given a greater prominence?

The large strides in molecular understanding of plant mineral nutrition over the last 16 years have mainly not been covered. Perhaps the unique selling point of all three editions of this book is the clarity in which soil chemistry and plant ecophysiology are linked, making it somewhat timeless.