Note 13: Review of Wild Flowers of the Victoria Falls Area by Helen Pickering and Evelyn Roe by Mark Hyde

Review of Wild Flowers of the Victoria Falls Area by Helen Pickering and Evelyn Roe published by Helen Pickering, London, 2009. ISBN: 978 0 9563634 0 4.

Photo: Front and back cover of Wild Flowers of the Victoria Falls Area

A new book, Wild Flowers of the Victoria Falls Area by Helen Pickering and Evelyn Roe, has just been published.

The book provides coloured photographs of 220 species of the more common and distinctive herbaceous plants and small shrubs found in the Victoria Falls area. Trees are not included as they are generally well covered in other publications.

This work is the result of field work carried out by the authors during 2008, mostly in Zambia in the Livingstone area, although some of the photos used are from Zimbabwe.

The book is very attractively designed and has been printed to a high standard by Aquila Printers in Lusaka. Each image has a drop-shadow and there are often smaller images showing specific details of parts of the plant.

I should declare that I was involved in providing identifications to some of the plants and Helen visited Harare twice during 2008 and 2009 and we spent some time working on identifying the images in the National Herbarium.

Furthermore, Helen kindly allowed us to use her images freely on our website, resulting in a number of very welcome new species.

Full lists of the images which we have incorporated to date may be found on the following pages, namely those taken by: Helen Pickering and those by Evelyn Roe.

Wild Flowers of the Victoria Falls Area is highly recommended for anyone interested in plants and who is visiting the Falls (on either side). Details of how it may be obtained are to found on the Kalahari plants website.