Kāpiti College Library

Notes

The history of botanical illustration began for New Zealand with Captain Cook’s first voyage of exploration in 1769 when Dr Joseph Banks brought with him Sydney Parkinson, a young, eager, skilful, and hardworking natural history draftsman.
Two hundred years later, in spite of the development of varied photographic techniques, the botanical artist with a personal knowledge of his plants still has an important contribution to make. The Oxford Book of New Zealand Plants follows the early tradition. Here Bruce Irwin presents thirty-two water-colour plates and eighty in pencil which not only depict whole specimens but also reveal, in a thousand sketches, the world of beauty that can be seen with a simple hand lens.
The 400 species illustrated are native New Zealand and represent all the main Divisions of the plant kingdom. Few modern books offer such a broad coverage: thirteen plates are devoted to ‘lower’ groups including seaweeds, mosses, and ferns, and the remainder to Families of ‘higher’ plants, including trees, shrubs, and small herbs. In the text facing each plate there is a short diagnosis of the group of the Family, followed by less formal notes on the species illustrated; more botanical information is condensed into captions accompanying the drawings. The emphasis throughout is on reproductive structures and life histories which form the basis of classification. The aim is to assist the user in classifying specimens into Families and broader groups rather than to provide names for a great number of species.
The planning of this volume has been influenced by the needs of amateurs, especially members of a local botanical and natural history societies, but the book will also serve biology students and their teachers and should appeal to anyone who has a genuine interest in plants or in flower painting. Specialists concerned with the flora of New Zealand will find much that is novel in the illustrations.