Stop and smell our wild flowers

Damien Enright on a new guide to hedgerow beauties

THERE is so much to learn and enjoy in the new pocket book from the Sherkin Island Marine Station, entitled A Beginner’s Guide to Irish Wild Flowers that I cannot imagine anybody, other than an expert, requiring more.

All the flowers we regularly see are there, well illustrated and described, some 160 flowers in all. Twelve years ago, the author, John Akeroyd, compiled a watershed work, The Wild Plants of Sherkin, Cape Clear and adjacent islands of West Cork. That was a volume for an expert, albeit accessible to the interested reader; but this latest is a book perfectly made and edited for the ordinary man.