A new way of seeing

IT is a rare privilege for a gardening writer to have a new edition of a book published posthumously.

- By George Plumptre

Such luminaries include Gertrude Jekyll and Russell Page... and now Roger Phillips. His bestseller, Trees, has just had a revised edition released by Macmillan, which published the ground-breaking original in 1978.

The book covers trees of North America, Europe, the UK and Ireland and has been expanded to cover 650 species from the original 500. As well as its comprehensiveness, it has all the other instantly recognisable hallmarks of Phillips's particular style that made this—and all the books he produced over a lifetime of writing about plants—so compelling. He had a way of combining simplicity of description with botanical authenticity, so a book such as Trees becomes much more than an illustrated list.

Because he was as good a photographer as he was a writer, the images—painstakingly detailed—contribute as much as the text, in particular in the first section, the Leaf Key Index, which Phillips pioneered. The sheer quantity of close detail is revealing of both the individual characteristics of different trees and the subtle variances within a family or genus.