A nicely produced book, which forms a useful companion to "The Wildflower Key" by the same author, although the format is a bit large to carry as a field guide.

The first half of the book consists of keys: keys to grasses in flower, keys to vegetative grasses by habitat, keys to sedges, keys to rushes and keys to ferns. Most of the keys lead to smaller keys for genera etc. Apart from the introductory keys, they are conventional dichotomous keys. They are illustrated with line drawings in the margin and printed in two columns using rather spaced out capitals to emphasise key words. [Layout-wise, this doesn’t really work, as the columns are too narrow to take the capitalisation and the text is too broken up with only 4 or 5 words per line.]

The second half is given over to descriptions and paintings on facing pages. The paintings are really line-drawings coloured in and are reminiscent of hand-painted Victorian works. The advantage of this approach is that all the detail is there in the underlying line-drawing so they are more useful than the more attractive paintings in Fitter, Fitter & Farrer.