The first scientific flora of South Georgia was published in 1964 by Stanley Greene and included some early distributional maps of the vascular plants. Produced as a large format report it was hardly a field guide and, although it had good drawings and some black and white photographs of the individual species, it was really only meant for professional botanists. Since that time several guides to the natural history of South Georgia have figured some of the plants but this is the first real field guide to feature the plants. Produced as a full colour 72 page booklet for only 25 taxa one might have expected a rather better product than has been achieved.

Whilst I know that this booklet is meant for the tourist that cannot be an excuse for poor editing and inadequate photographs. My problems start with the title – this would have been more accurately called a “Field guide to the flowering plants of South Georgia” as there is virtually nothing in it on the lichens and cryptogams which make up such a large part of the flora. The summary box on the back cover mentions 26 native plants when there are only 25. The confusion between tussac and tussock begins on p.5. The inset map of the Scotia Arc islands on p.6 is missing all the islands, whilst on the main map one can only guess that the names in bold occur somewhere in the text whilst those in roman or italic do not. As it turns out this is incorrect, but with no explanation of the use of different typefaces, the reader is left confused. A general comment is that there are far too many small photographs in this booklet illustrating subjects that are not central to its purpose – those of Captain Cook, reindeer skeletons in a peat bog, king penguins in St Andrews Bay, orographic cloud, a group on the Shackleton Crossing, hut at St Andrews Bay, Husvik manager's villa, the great nunatak, plants from Macquarie Island, Shag Rocks, geology, etc. Seven pages on the history of botanical exploration also seems too much. Omitting these would have allowed much larger and clearer photos of the vegetation types as well as of the alien species, some of which (like those for curled dock, common sorrel, common bent, annual meadow grass and smooth meadow grass) are illustrated by truly awful photos that will help nobody. This seems especially sad as the report produced last year by the Kew survey on introduced plants had excellent photographs of all the alien species. In addition, since there are no drawings of any plant parts, the omission of close-ups of the fruiting/seed heads of several species is not helpful to the non-botanist. There are many other statements which cast doubt on the research by the author. On p.11 it says that the coast line is usually free of sea ice in summer (it rarely has any significant sea ice even in winter), on p.15 it should be Johann and Georg Forster as they were German not British, on p.43 it is not clear who has said that the pigments in Festuca are there for UV protection or on what evidence, on p.55 there is minimal evidence that horses were used to travel between whaling stations, and so on. I also note that although there are now good distribution maps for all the flowering plants on the island none of these were included with the species accounts nor was there a link given to the Antarctic Plant Database at BAS which holds such maps. It would have been useful to let the reader know what the distribution of each species was beyond South Georgia and perhaps question if Alopecurus and Blechnum are possible introductions from the Falkland Islands. A lack of familiarity with the literature means that there is no mention of the flowering periods of the species, of the preformation of flowers that characterises some species, nor of special features like gynodioecy in Acaena magellanica, or pseudoriripary in grasses, nor of the interesting reason why the hybrid Acaena only forms on South Georgia. Even the Reference list is not adequate with unnecessary references to the explorations of Bellinghausen, Cook and Forster whilst omitting many papers actually on the native plants. I would also have expected the reference list to have contained entries for the lichen, moss and liverwort floras for the island to at least indicate what else is know about the island's vegetation. I accept that the booklet will allow the tourist to identify the native flowering plants on the island but it could have been so much better planned, better illustrated and more focussed. I am forced to say it would probably have been better if it had been written by a botanist.