Leuk overzicht van basiskennis van plantenkunde

This book gives an overview of basic botany (more or less first year student level) but rather than being a dry recital of facts is told is an entertaining way with many photos and illustrations. There are only 120 pages of text and much of that space is taken up with the illustrations. That meant that I easily read it in one afternoon. Sometimes it was a bit too chatty (all the 'amazing's and so on got a bit irritating) and there is also quite heavy use of technical terms. I have a degree in botany, so that was fine, but I think I'm not the intended audience. He dealt with the eternal dilemma of what to do about plants' names well; common language in the text and scientific names in footnotes.
There were a couple of strange things in the book. He makes the statement that plants in the same family flower at the same time (p66). Firstly, for many families that is really not so. I worked on the Ranunculaceae and you can find those flowering from early species to late summer, and perhaps even in the autumn. What is more, there is a famous study of Ranunculus pseudofluitans, a water crowfoot (buttercup) that as you go downstream, the same species flowers later. That is genetically determined; if you transplant them, they flower on the same date as the source plants, not the date of those in the new site. Having said that, some plants like gentians do tend to flower in the autumn, but that is also quite logical, they (by definition) have a similar genetic makeup and evolutionary history, so where it does occur, it is really not the case that "no one knows" as he writes. The statements about longevity of seeds are also a bit incorrect; some mosses have been grown from fragments/spores over a thousand years old.
A more serious problem is that the author has difficult grasping how evolution works, and therefore comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to understand, and so we can best ascribe what we don't understand to 'God' (by whatever name). There are quite some issues with that line of argument. Theologically, it results in 'a God of the gaps' where the concept of God is something that gets smaller and smaller over time as we understand more. In terms of evolutionary biology, it is really not so difficult as the author claims. For example, on p83 he describes how carnivorous plants like Drosera curl up to capture their prey and then declaims that it is a great mystery how such a mechanism could evolve. But only ten pages later, he cites the example of D. lusitanicum which glues flies to their leaves, but doesn't curl up. Surely that is a perfect example of exactly that evolution might have occurred with an intermediate form? The same line of argument applies to the other examples he gives. Sometimes we can imagine the intermediates, sometimes not, but that doubtless says more about our imaginations than anything. Naturally, if you are talking about soft tissues forming organs, then there is no fossil evidence. Modern DNA analysis techniques have resulted in huge strides in understanding of evolutionary mechanisms in recent years, and it is a pity that those insights are not mentioned.
The book is very short and misses out some important things; mycorrhiza, mosses, plant communities and symbioses for example. Still, better to leave the reader wanting more than to let them get bored. This is definitely a book that will stimulate at least some readers to go into more depth.