Please note that this is a slightly smaller version of Sarah Raven's Wild Flowers, published in 2011. Although the page count is the same, this version is released in a more practical format (189 × 246 mm, instead of the 222 × 289 mm of the original). The publisher has informed us that there are minor differences between these two editions: "The new, cheaper edition is a slimmed down version of the same content. It covers largely the same things, but slightly more briefly, and in places has fewer images".
Inspired by childhood excursions with her botanist father, Sarah Raven has travelled the length and breadth of the British Isles to find 500 of our most breathtakingly beautiful wild flowers.
This photographically illustrated book is divided by habitat, covering woods, downs and dales, lanes and hedgerows, meadows, coast, marshes and streams, moors and mountains, and wasteland. Sarah introduces a wide range of plants, telling you their names and something about them – how to identify the families, how they're brilliantly adapted to their environment, their importance to animals and insects, what herbal remedies they can be used for, the story behind their common names and the part they play in local history.
Join Sarah on trips to see pulsatillas, fritillaries, bluebells, wild garlic, harebells, forget-me-nots, foxgloves, wood spurge, silverweed, purple cranesbill, deadly nightshade, St John's wort, comfrey, orchids, wood sorrel, snowdrops, and more.
There are glorious landscape photographs by Jonathan Buckley throughout, and one of his stunning plant portraits accompanies each of Sarah's authoritative, captivating species descriptions. Informative and lovely, Sarah Raven's Wild Flowers is a botanical marvel.
Sarah Raven is a broadcaster, teacher and writer. She has made regular appearances on Gardeners' World, the BBC's flagship gardening programme; she runs her own cookery and gardening school at Perch Hill in East Sussex; and she is the author of Sarah Raven's Food for Family and Friends, The Cutting Garden, Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook (which was the Guild of Food Writers Cookery Book of the Year 2008) and Sarah Raven's Complete Christmas.
Jonathan Buckley specialises in garden and plant photography and has been working with Sarah Raven, taking photographs at Perch Hill, for ten years. He was awarded the title Garden Writers' Guild Features Photographer of the Year in 2004.
"An epic and beautiful volume, which I will be poring over with my children, and pressing many flowers between its pages"
– Robert Macfarlane
"Impressive, beautiful to look at and truly a labour of love"
– Sunday Times
"Dazzling"
– Scotsman
"William Blake found 'heaven in a wild flower' and so, too, has writer Sarah Raven in this epic treatise"
– Living