Sarah Raven comes of a botanising family. Her father John, a Cambridge classics don, travelled all over the British Isles studying wildflowers. Like his own father, Charles Raven, he was a gifted watercolourist, and between them they drew almost every plant in the British flora. Sarah still possesses 18 volumes of their watercolours.
Nevertheless, to illustrate her huge, learned and comprehensive book of 500 wildflowers, she chose a photographer, Jonathan Buckley. This was partly because she had written with him before on other books, but mainly because they could travel and work together. They visited over 100 sites to track down the specimens, often 20 or 30 in one favoured place, where he would ‘lie on his stomach for hours at a stretch photographing them’. They dropped the usual botanical approach of standing above the plant to snap it, and instead he took the pictures from the flower’s own level. This has produced a large number of highly informative close-ups. The corncockle, for instance (Agrostemma githago), and the wild carrot (Daucus carota) have never been better photographed.
In addition, because Raven has chosen to classify her presentation under eight types of scenery (wood; lane, wall and hedge; meadow; chalk down and limestone dale; arable and wasteland; water and wetlands; heath, moor and mountain; coast), Buckley has taken a large number of photos of the background against which the flowers grow. These are of spectacular quality and constitute the chief artistic merit of the book. Indeed, reproduced with great fidelity by the publishers, Bloomsbury, they are among the best nature photographs I have ever seen, though, presented as double-page spreads, they add enormously to the size of the book, which is one of the weightiest I have ever handled, and has to be read sitting at a table.
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