A Tree Guide
Bharati Jagannathan
TREES OF DELHI: A FIELD GUIDE by Pradip Krishen Dorling Kindersley, 2007, 360 pp., 799
February 2007, volume 31, No 2

Having been a tree-spotter for over a dozen years, this reviewer was growing increasingly frustrated as every new book on trees-and a fair number of glossies have been published on the subject in the last five or six years-did nothing better than re-chronicle the semals, gulmohars and kachnars that catch every laypersons’ eye, with some cassias and acacias thrown in for good measure. More erudite encyclopaedias reclining sagely in the reference sections of libraries tended to speak only to professors of Botany. Their line drawings of leaves and flowers with careful detailing of seed dispersal methods and the usual geographical range of particular tree species were no more useful as a field guide than the coffee table books with spectacular full-page spreads of golden amaltas against summer-blue skies.

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