Planned in five volumes, this critical Flora provides a definitive account of the native species, naturalised species, frequent garden escapes and casuals found in the British Isles. Full keys and descriptions will enable the user to name all plants occurring in the wild, plus some ornamental trees and shrubs. For the first time detailed accounts of all the large apomictic genera are given and many infraspecific variants included. Each species entry begins with the accepted Latin name, synonyms and the common English name. A detailed description follows, including information on flowering period, pollination and chromosome number. Separate descriptions are given for infraspecific taxa. Information on the status, ecology and distribution (including worldwide distribution) of the species and infraspecific taxa is also given. Clear black and white line drawings illustrate an extensive glossary and also illuminate the diagnostic features in a number of groups of plants.

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Summary Angiosperm classification is to be understood in relation to its development against a particular historical and philosophical background—that of seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century Europe. The selection of the world's flora and the botanical literature available to Linnaeus and his immediate successors determined the main shape of the classification which we use today. Willis's generalization about the relationship between the age of a taxon and its size (part of his so‐called ‘A.S.A. hypothesis’) is valid enough, both for families (if size is judged by number of genera) and for genera (if size is judged by number of species). Willis, however, thought of the age of the taxon in evolutionary terms; all that is necessary to validate the generalization is to interpret ‘age’ quite literally as the number of years since the particular taxon was created in the mind of the taxonomist. A corollary of this thesis is that we have no reason to think that Angiosperm classification would be substantially the same if botany had developed in, say, New Zealand in the nineteenth century instead of medieval and post‐medieval Europe. The stability of Angiosperm families, essentially unchanged since de Jussieu, is no evidence of their ‘correctness’; family boundaries might be seriously different, and the main reference purposes of the classification still be adequately served. Taxonomists should accept that their function is to provide a convenient reference system for the science as a whole; they would then be very conservative in suggesting changes to the existing system, which is convenient enough, and could devote their efforts more practically to making available in a reasonably accessible form the enormous body of taxonomic information already accumulated in the specialist literature.